American Centre weekly film screening on Tuesday evening will feature science fiction during the month of April, starting with ‘2001: A space odyssey’ on April 7 at 6 pm.
Based on Arthur C. Clarke’s story The Sentinel, the film deals with thematic elements of human evolution, technology, artificial intelligence, and extraterrestrial life.
Written by Arthur C. Clarke and Kubrick himself, the screenplay is structured in four movements.
At the “Dawn of Man,” a group of hominids encounters a mysterious black monolith alien to their surroundings. To the strains of Strauss’s 1896 Also sprach Zarathustra, a hominid invents the first weapon, using a bone to kill prey.
As the hominid tosses the bone in the air, Kubrick cuts to a 21st century spacecraft hovering over the Earth, skipping ahead millions of years in technological development. U.S. scientist Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) travels to the moon to check out the discovery of a strange object on the moon’s surface: a black monolith.
As the sun’s rays strike the stone, however, it emits a piercing, deafening sound that fills the investigators’ headphones and stops them in their path.
Considered as one of the greatest films ever made; the 2002 Sight & Sound poll of critics ranked ‘2001: A space odyssey’ among the top ten films of all time and it was nominated for four Academy Awards, and received one for visual effects.
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