Coming out of 2001: A Space Odyssey, I had one main question: Why were all the shots so long?


With an average shot length (ASL) of 13 seconds I personally felt as though the movie dragged a little at points. The ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence that started the film lasted 15 minutes without dialogue, and apparently this was added as an afterthought to the original script as Kubrick believed the rest of the movie was too fast paced!

There’s hundreds of theories online about this. Apparently at one point the film had a whole script of narration - a trope common in Sci-Fi movies of the period - that Kubrick decided to cut at the last minute. Others online credit the decision to “establishing technical verisimilitude”, “Forcing reflection” for the viewer and giving scale to what Kubrick called “the grandeur of space” (click the links above if you fancy reading more ostentatious reviews).

One potential answer is that this was just how movies were made at the time. You can look at all of Kubrick’s filmography to illustrate this; “A Clockwork Orange”, “The Shining” and “Barry Lyndon” all have ASLs in this 11-14 second range. However, this has been decreasing since the late 80s with 90s movies such as “Pulp Fiction” commonly clocking ASLs around 8 seconds and modern ‘Mainstream blockbusters’ averaging just 2-3 seconds.

I think nowadays we’re so over exposed to amazing CGI and stimulating imagery that we (at least ‘I’) struggle to appreciate the quality of 2001’s shots. Back in 1968 when the movie was released, these would have been awe inspiring and groundbreaking, something that the viewer would want to linger on just to get a better look. Who knows, maybe Kubrick kept to these longer shots just to show off his craft.

What isn’t debatable is the quality of the design of the movie. The interior sets; the model spaceships; the slit-scan photography of the ‘stargate’ sequence; the makeup and costuming of the hominids from ‘The Dawn of Man’; this is all years ahead of its time, and that’s clear to see just by the fact that a movie with such a reliance on special effects still holds up today.


In fact the only bit of design I think you can criticise might be the tongue in cheek ‘Zero Gravity Toilet’. I at least know that Ben Craven would have some words to say about that signage…

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5th Jan