What's so great about "A Space Odyssey"?

ImaLooser

It was way ahead of its time. People just didn't make movies like that then, that told a story without words. The message about humanity going to a higher stage of evolution was timely, and it was trippy. There was a big CG Jung influence too, which was pretty hot stuff in the day.

Kubrick likes slow moving things. You can see it stately grandeur or as boring. In the first cut there was a ten-minute scene of an astronaut running on a centrifuge to show the boredom of travel in space. Arthur C. Clarke hated it. I always suspected that Arthur called up Stanley afterward and threatened him with death if he didn't cut that.

I like the movie but I don't think I will ever sit through it again. The books aren't all that impressive either. Try Childhood's End. That was the movie that Kubrick originally wanted to make but someone else owned it.

Star Wars I was also a very big deal when it came out. Lucas's innovation was realizing that lots of things in the future would look old and worn out, and maybe not even work very well. It seems pretty obvious now but no one had thought of it. Stuff in the future was always brand new.

So these films look dated because they've been imitated so much and improved upon.

EBENEZR

I really liked this scene!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe there is a reason why you should read the novels first. Not out of literary superiority, but because the book can go into grand detail that a movie cannot. A book is a sole adventure, whereas movies, generally, are a shared experience. You cannot share a heavily detailed experience like being immersed in a novel because you will go at different rates and a movie that consists of people just sitting and talking (could you imagine if LOTR films actually consisted of half of what was written in them? They would have to be a series and a particularly inactive one at that. The reason so much detail in a book is acceptable where it isn't in a movie is because you are forced to imagine. This involves you mentally engaging and thus it is not boring. With a film, it has already been imagined, you are now just observing someone else's interpretation which takes the joy out of an immersive, detailed story.

As such, movies that are adapted from books, particularly ones that are confusing without the detail of the novel, are really for people who have read the novel first and can be appreciated to a greater degree in a group if the members have all read the book. Of course, in the case of LOTR they managed to execute it in a way that you didn't need to know all the details, but the same cannot be said for 2001: A Space Odyssey. You really do have to read the book for it to make sense. I haven't read it all, in fact only read a few of the first chapters, but having done so a lot of it started making sense.

Anyway, it's not what I'd call the best film of all time, but come on... the moment where there is nothing but his heavy breathing must be one of the tensest moments in film history!

ImaLooser

But in the final cut it isn't ten minutes long.

EBENEZR

Did the director's cut? Because I think I saw that one.

If that one was shorter too, that's probably why I liked it. Either 10 mins passed quickly or I am glad it didn't last that long haha.

BWV

Ligeti's music, for one

H2Bro

2001 is still one of my favorite sci fi novels. Why? Because it shows that at the pinnacle of human achievement we are tiny flecks of dust compared to the larger intelligences out there. Plus, at the end, the transition of a human into a semi omnipotent omniscient god is left me wondering.

I didn't get nearly as much from 2001 the movie. It was really more about breakthrough effects and maybe conveying the static, silent, slow pace of life in space.

2010 is a good book. 2061 is a bit worse. 3001 must have been published to make quick cash. The best parts are passages taken from the previous books, and the book skips over the parts readers would find most interesting. Maybe ACC lost some of his writing vigor by that time.

I watched the movie before reading the novel, and watched the directors cut after the novel. I liked the directors cut more, but maybe this was because it was just providing visual candy for the story I had already digested.

BWV

The screenplay for 2001 preceded the book, so the movie is the original work

LPV man

Well the screenplay and novel were written at the same time. Where the differences come in is after the novels publication the screenplay continued it's development. I dont know if either the budget or techniques could have handled it, but I wish they'd filmed ACC version of the stargate transitions.

Lost Worlds of 2001 does cover some of the evolution behind the screenplay and if I recall correctly has a number of alternate endings for the film included

lpetrich

I also like that movie, and not just the psychedelic parts.

Some of it I find a bit difficult to interpret, I must say.

There are interesting differences between then and now.

Space travel is MUCH less advanced than what the movie pictured. Humanity has not left low Earth orbit since the early 1970's, and the three space stations sent up so far have looked more like collections of tin cans than that big wheel. Cramped ones that do not spin to make artificial gravity. Skylab, Mir, and the ISS.

However, automated spacecraft have been sent to every planet and several smaller objects.

Computers are very different. While the movie followed the Intimidating Big Machine model, what we have is lots of small computers in addition to the big ones.

But despite all the software we have created, artificial intelligence lags FAR behind the movie, something that's one of the great disappointments of my life.

A more serious issue is a major plot point of the movie. HAL's erroneous behavior was a major issue, while erroneous behavior has been all too common among the more common sorts of computers.


I remember Isaac Asimov saying about a certain part of that movie "They're breaking the First Law! They're breaking the First Law!" One of his Three Laws of Robotics, or more generally, AI programming. Someone calmed him down by saying "Isaac, why don't you strike them with lightning?"

EagleNebula

I saw the movie back when I was, I think, 12 years old. I was just in awe after I saw it. I thought the visuals were very impressive and I also found the story to be deep and existential. I can't say I understood a lot from it by watching it the first time but it definetly stuck with me. 10/10 IMHO.

Crikey

I've seen 2001 ASO about a dozen times over the years and I still don't understand the ending!
One of my favourite scenes is where the computer mutinies and locks them out in space, but one crewman outwits it to get back in via the airlock, then systematically sets about pulling its memory chips one by one to disable it, ha ha..:)

OCR

Odd I guess, but I never saw a bit of humor in...



OCR

Borek

The greatest scene of the movie if you ask me.