From Jonathan Pacheco, Anna, TX:
Seemingly too easy of a choice, this film's first shot meets your criteria perfectly. After a slightly creepy overture, we are blessed with shot of a barely visible moon. It slowly moves down as the earth rises above it, and even more distant, the sun rises above the earth.
All of this happens as "Also sprach Zarathustra" beams in the background, a song and tone poem based on a book that spoke about the journey in the evolution from ape to man to superman. Already, Kubrick is telling us exactly what will happen in the next couple of hours with just the music. The visuals are telling us exactly how his film should be approached: as a slow but massive epic, a film with concepts and visuals that should be pondered and revered, much like one is awed when looking up at the heavens. As an added bonus, the final shot in the film uses the first shot and takes it to the next level.
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 "Traumnovella" -- 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").
Also, visually in this shot, Kubrick on one level is giving a preview of the journey of the film: Earth, the Moon and Beyond. On another level, it is a statement of one of the basic themes of the film, which is the relationship of Man with the Universe. Earth in alignment with the Moon, then the Sun, with the stars behind. all asking the question of how one is related to the other.
I've been fortunate to see 2001 on the big screen several times, including the anniversary 70mm print that toured around the country a few years ago. It remains one of the defining movie experiences of my life.
Compounding on what Drew said, the three celestial bodies in alignment represent the three stages of evolution Man will go through in this film: The moon, cold, lifeless, solid and unchanging as our distant, cave-dwelling history is; Earth, blue and alive and poised in a fragile and vulnerable position between silent death (the moon) and a bright, overwhelming future (the Sun), much the same way Man at his technological peak is for most of the film, and the Sun, while compositionally the smallest element in the frame is still the spot our eyes are drawn to. It radiates with the spark of infinite possibility, potentially in our grasp if we make the effort to go for it. The sun is our evolution, our transcendence to a higher entity which not only consumes life in the universe, but gives it as well.
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I think it's equally fascinating if we consider the opening titles of 2001 to be just that -- titles -- and instead consider the opening shots to be those immediately following the title "THE DAWN OF MAN". The sun slowly rises over a series of long static shots of desert; giant swathes of beautiful yet empty nothingness opening out to a jagged horizon. The first hint we get that anything lives in this dry, silent wasteland, coming after many long seconds of empty landscape, is a skull of some tusked animal, followed immediately by the prostrate skeleton of an ape. Thus, coming right after the triumphant promise of birth shouted by the titles, we are confronted with what Kubrick always wants us to keep in mind as primary defining conditions of human experience: death and the void. The final shot of 2001 will bring these opposites together in one of the most stirring images of rebirth captured in film.