2001: Space Odyssey Best Scenes - The Monolith At The Moon 

There's something utterly bone-chilling about the idea of discovering something that is unquestionably a product of sentient beings, but having no idea whatsoever what it could be.

hard to believe this was made in 68... damn this movie is amazing

This scene, in a G rated movie about ascension, is probably the scariest thing I've ever seen.

This scene alone justifies why this is one of the greatest movies ever made.

I love it how every time we see the monolith the human kind takes a step forward in the evolution, either it's learning the usage of tools, Traveling to a new planet, or becoming a new being. It was a pure genius of putting the consept of god, evolution and aliens, into an object without finding out almost anything about what it is, or what it actually does.

I love how at 2:26, the reflection on the monolith looks like there is someone on the other side touching Floyd's hand.

The music makes it feel like you are watching something that has a supernatural presence, god, aliens, whatever, it is beyond our plane of understanding

Ligeti's music is 50% of the unsettling power of this sequence. Kudos to Kubrick for having the knowledge to find it and the insight to use it.

This movie scared the ever-living shit out of me when I was a kid. Still one if the best movies I've ever seen though.

The score will just seen chills up your spine. It wouldn't have the same effect for any worldly, relatable situation either. The amount of curiosity and fear about space during that time in society, would have loved to experienced this in theaters.

This scene was the first one filmed in "2001." Principal photography began here on December 29, 1965.

Every time I watch a clip from 2001 I'm simply amazed at the quality of the futurism. Someone put a great deal of effort and thought into conceiving what future technologies might actually be like.

The shot at 2:23 is one of the greatest shots ever composed for a movie and one of the greatest moments in any movie ever. There is so much going on in this one shot- it’s a little hard to comprehend.

The only movie to actually use the "fear of the unknown" concept to its full potential.

The 2001 spacesuits look "real" in so many ways - the plugable modules for the helmets that detail procedures and manual documents- likes todays flash drives, the backpacks that follow the design of the Apollo suits. Every Sci Fi film since I compare to these suits and they still appear more real than the later creations. And the walk down the ramp with the hand held camera (unheard of the time) takes the viewer into the mystery with Floyd.

I had just turned 12. My mother took me, my brother, and some school friends to The Windsor Cinerama Theater in Houston to see this movie. I was riveted when the pit scene was on. I still think this might be the Greatest sci fi film ever. Best Wishes. Sincerely, Tom

Simply one of the most brilliantly conceived and executed motion pictures ever. And many would argue....one of the most prophetic. Many have tried to analyze the meaning of the monolith. For me this is simple. It's a presence. Just that...a presence. It made itself known at the dawn of human intelligence and again as humans took their first steps into the unknown of space. I've seen this film at least a dozen times in my lifetime and I never fail to be mesmerized by it. Thank you A.C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick. You set the standard. And no one has matched it yet.

I remember when I watch this scene for the first time, I paused at 1:20 and I asked myself : "How is this possible than a scene of a movie can have so much tension ?!" Kubrick was truly a genius !

The way this scene made me feel when I first watched it is indescribable. No amount of words can justify the existentialism in this scene.

The Monolith doesn't want a selfie/groupfie. That's why it made a beaming sound ! 😉

Just saw the 50th anniversary screening of this in a theater. The audio of the signal from the monolith was much more piercing.

...this scene alone gives such an unbelievable feeling ...

The first day of shooting on 2001 - 50 years ago today, 29 December 1965.

Love how they use the same angles and music synced with how the monkeys also discovered it, approached it, and touched it. Opening shots are gr8 as well, best movie ever

It still gets me - the simple elegance of the machine, combined with its sophistication. Engineered to last millions of years, yet activated by sunlight falling on it.

I watched this in theaters today. The sound it made was so loud I had to actually cover my ears. I thought it was the theater’s actual alarm going off!

This soundtrack sounds like there was a huge choir of people making strange and scary sounds, which seems quite impressive on its own...whoever made this was a genius!!!👍👍👍

The musical choices in this film must be among the top 5 ever!!!! The pairing of Ligeti and Richard Strauss fucking MAKES this movie!!!

Movie was made in 68.....we didnt land on the moon til 69. Scary how accurate this is.

The most frightening scene I remember seeing as a kid! Still truly don’t understand what the monolith is or what it represents. The fact that it is inpenetrable is a clue.

I’ve never been so afraid of a rectangle in my life 😂

Watching this by yourself at night is pure terror.

Never have the meeting between humans and a totally unknowable alien presence been so dramatically depicted.

0:49 is the one of the greatest iconic science fiction scenes ever! It is the 2nd most iconic in 2001. Second only to the scene of the "Starchild" looking down at the Earth at the end of this magnificent movie.

Damn. It's a frickin' iPhone 7S!

Had the opportunity to see this film yesterday in a cinema, and let me tell you, that loud squeal at the end of the scene is not done justice on a tinny laptop speaker, or even headphones. The ENTIRE audience practically jumped out of their seats. It's deafeningly loud through a surround sound system.

Just glad there was a camera guy there with them to film this ground breaking evolutionary event.

One of the greatest movies ever made and a true masterpiece! They don't make movies like this anymore. The big monolith block just gets me every time. So many bizarre elements.

Perfect voicemail message.

I wish I would have gotten to see this on the big screen when it came out for it's anniversary last year. That would have been so fucking cool. Seeing this gorgeous masterpiece of a movie on an imax screen.

The vocal music is perfectly haunting. Reminds me of that Bjork album.

listening to that loud high-pitched noise in the theater on a huge screen with 70mm projected onto it is a whole new level of "Thats loud" Ive never heard anything louder in my entire life.

2:29 - Imagine this is real. That historic moment would be absolutely incredible.

I forgot how absolutely bone-chilling this scene was until I did some research on the movie for a scene study class. My heart is racing now. The musical score is simultaneously incredible and unsettling. The cinematography -- next level.

I am 100% convinced that Stanley intended this to be a extenitial horror film. everything about it is off putting and a bit unsettling.

Interesting to note that MGM execs were upset that Kubrick didn't have a finished score for the picture. Alex North, a talented composer was hired and collaborated with Kubrick. When North attended the screening of the movie, he was justifiably angry to find Kubrick hadn't used any of his music in the film. However, in retrospect, the Ligeti and Strauss music were perfect for the visuals shown. The mood of the mystical, mysterious monolith scene is proof.

The way Kubrick filmed parts of this going from a sterile, static camera view to the astronauts POV is just another reason he was such a great filmaker. Its totally unnerving in the same way the little girls in The Shinning were.

After 50 years the set designs still felt futuristic, this is flippin epic

Woah, that camerawork at 1.14 is just amazing, can't believe it is a 1968 shot

The Monolith was solar powered so they would know when man had the nuclear bomb coinciding when they could detect the trans-magnetic anomaly signal and excavate around it. A lunar day is two-weeks, the same for a lunar night. The sun was rising when they landed. When the sunlight lit the monolith, it sent a narrow beam aimed radio signal to Jupiter so powerful the signal bled across multiple channels on their UHF/VHF radio intercoms in their helmets.

the hand hald shots are just amazing

調査隊が直接モノリスの穴に入らず、入り口で並び立ちそれをカメラが見上げるシーンは最高です。

The first time I saw this film I must have been around eleven years old and this scene has always stuck in my mind , absolutely brilliant from start to finish, a peace of complete art and why I still love watch this film , so ahead of its time and still is , you feel the indefinite vastness of space and how frightening that fact is ……

this is still the scariest thing i’ve ever seen

Stanley Kubrick's finest horror film. More creepy music and onscreen murders than The Shining.

I know this wouldn’t have been easy in 68, but I’d have loved to see the monolith as pitch black as it’s described in the book. It’s solid, but it’s so dark that no light even reflects off of it. It’s like someone carved out a block of spacetime and left it empty

Such a simple object, a perfect cuboid, and it's location is so intriguing - placed to deliberately attract our attention.

The Monolith is the aliens calling card. Basically it says (without words) “Some form of intelligence buried this here, it was us.” In reality, discovery of the Monolith is in fact first contact.

Ligeti's music is a huge part of what makes this scene feel so mysterious and mesmerizing.

People, remember... this movie is from Nineteen Sixty-Eight!

Just goofing around one day in High School shop class, a couple of us made a “monolith” to the 1:4:9 dimensions, although somewhat smaller than in the movie. The next day in class, I brought in a can of ultra-flat black paint. At first the teacher was upset, but then he started laughing. It was all in good fun. I still have it in my basement, but my wife thinks it needs to be thrown out! 😅

0:43 this shot, this shot right here is the best shot in cinema history

This is the best scene I have ever seen in a film ever, nothing even comes close.

Another thing: this set is completely symmetrical, with two little diggers, two sets of lights, and two ramps and sets of boxes and spheres at the walls, so that the camera didn't have to be moved around much, and a hand-held shot could be done facing in any direction and capture the action in a slightly-disorienting way.

the tension in this music must hit that range in our hearing that produces anxiety, no matter how many times I have seen this it makes me feel like bugs r crawling on me, and as it slows and intensifies in the monkey scene, jist brilliant

@3:43 monolth , sun & moon are in alignment & there are other alignments with the sun in the movie _- yip there's an alignment vibe going on

Superb, epic and chilling moment about the power of the unknown. The most incomprehensible thing is why the apes obtained wisdom after touch the Monolith but in this time it revealed threatening

November 2020... a mysterious metal monolith that no one had any idea about have been found in the dessert of Utah, United States

According to the concept of the film, these guys in spacesuits would look like apemen to an advanced race a million years from then

Now, in late 2020, one like it appeared in Utah, and then it disappeared.

Can we just take a moment and appreciate these brave actors for going all the way to the moon just to shoot a movie? That's some real dedication to your craft.

I saw this film in theaters last summer for its 50th anniversary. IMAX. Was with my dad, who saw it when it was originally released. I was absolutely blown away. I still dont understand how Kubrick filmed some of those scenes! Timeless movie that I will now pass on to my kids.

Goosebumps... creepy sound...

The greatest movie ever made. Period.

Watched this masterpiece in Split, Croatia in the summer of 1968. I was 12 years old. It made quite an impression on me, especially the photography and score.

Rewatching this in the theater I had the same anticipation and dread as the Trinity test in Oppenheimer, but 2001 has no deafening blast, only that high pitched ringing.

The music alone is enough to give one the heebie jeebies.

The fact that somebody was capable of making such a thrilling scene 50 years ago is oustanding

when I was younger I wondered what mistake on script as sound and vibration does not propagate in vacuum. Later I read somewhere the obvious: the monolith was made by such evolved technology it could modulate in any frequency and any mode and really deafened the astronauts on their own rf intercoms

These effects hold up incredibly well, plus the set looks gorgeous

Just noticed this after all theses years...Kubrick deliberately shows the 'site' on the dark side of the moon. haha

Fun day in the recording studio for that choir 😂

The Monolith ... is BLACK MIRROR 😎

"Ages on ages roll'd over him! In stony sleep ages roll'd over him." -William Blake

Archaeologists discover the iPhone 20, 3000 C.E . (Colorized)

that monolith looks strikingly similar to a modern smartphone

I love how the grew of Homo Sapiens is just as hesitant about approaching the monolith as the hominids were in the earlier scene.

This scene is a perfect example how to do horror without actually doing horror.

The scene starting at 3:00 shows the black monolith with a red light in the top middle, just like HAL.

The shot at 3:40 of sunrise over the monolith, with the slender crescent of the Earth above the slab and he sun, is wondrous, and deservedly iconic. That makes you wonder why, in the establishing shots at the beginning of this scene (from the start of this video until 1:12), showing the broad panorama of this part of the lunar surface, we’re shown that from that point on the moon, they were seeing not a mere slender crescent of the earth’s surface illuminated in sunlight, but over half of the side visible from Tycho crater. It’s not a fatal flaw that ruins the movie, or anything like that, but it reflects curious inattention to an obvious detail. It’s just surprising that no one involved in making the film was alert to the point, that the Earth would not have gone from gibbous phase to crescent phase, in the few minutes it took this group to walk down from the surface level, to the excavated monolith.

This soundtracks and alien(1979) will forever be the most haunting soundtracks of all time. Both movies are geniuses in they’re own craft. Terrifying.

The music is Lux Eterna by Gregor Legiti

Music : György Ligeti, Requiem

Beyond unsettling the tense atmosphere and ambient of the scene was enough to scare even me one of the most die-hard horror fans. Such an effective scene that lets us know that we really don't know anything about the larger forces at play in our own universe

I love how there is a hum when it is touched.

I like how the flood light arrays facing away from the camera are always turned off for the sake of making the lighting predominantly backlit (for aesthetic purposes).

This is the best part in a movie scene in history….. excellent. SB was def a genius.

2020: FOUND A MYSTERIOUS METAL MONOLITH PEOPLE WHO WATCH THESE MOVIE 19yrs ago:👁👄👁

It is beyond our understanding because this world is beyond our understanding. The whole scene is a description of us not really knowing anything at all about our own existence. The touching of the monolith is a try and a step forward to the unknown like our whole existence is...we simply just don't know and possibly we will never really know. All we really have is theories it doesn't go much further than that. We were just not made and not meant to know. All we can do is live a normal life according to what we can actually understand (which is really not much in general...)

Are you watching this on your monolith?