JE: Right you are, Jonathan. Kubrick composed his films with a thoroughly musical technique unlike any other director I can think of. (I've said it before: "Eyes Wide Shut" is ridiculous if seen as a straight narrative [it is, after all, based on a "Traumnovelle" -- or, "Dream Story"]; it's magnificent when you look at it as a musical composition, using imagey the way musicians use sounds -- thematic statements, colors, tempos, structure, repetition, development, variation...)
When we see the image of the planets and the monolith in alignment at the beginning of the film's last movement (the psychedelic star trip into inner/outer space), we have that momentous sense that this is the climax of the picture, and it could take us anywhere -- even if we don't understand exactly what's going on. And then, in the last few moments of the film, the spherical, planet-sized Star Child drifts into view...
I saw "2001" at the Cinerama Theater in Seattle when I was 10 years old. My life has never been the same since. Kubrick finds expression for the mystery and awe of being alive in this universe, at this time, by invoking images of the unimaginably distant past ("The Dawn of Man") and the unimaginably near future ("Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite").
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