10 Genius Editing Decisions That Made Movie Scenes Great

10. A Single Cut Perfectly Captures Human Progress - 2001: A Space Odyssey

The match cut is one of the most potentially powerful weapons in a filmmaker's arsenal, cutting from one object to another similar-looking one in order to imply a relationship between them.

And perhaps the most famous match cut in cinema history goes to the best - or, at least, the most meaningful - in Stanley Kubrick's sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The mesmerising opening Dawn of Man sequence concludes with an ape discovering how to use a bone as a tool, which it then throws into the air.

At this moment, Kubrick cuts to a similarly-shaped satellite orbiting in space in the far future.

At once, Kubrick has used a single cut to not only demonstrate the passage of 4 million years, but also human evolution, from the basic adoption of tools to the development of unfathomably complex ones.

Kubrick clearly could've transitioned from the Dawn of Man sequence any number of ways, but in creating such a potent visual tether between epochs, he embraced the film's primarily theme perfectly.