I remember renting it on VHS about a million years ago and then falling asleep and not seeing the whole thing.
I just watched the second half (from the intermission onwards) on TV. Holy shit, is this a boring movie. Don’t get me wrong, I love science fiction, but I also need something to keep me awake. I am not a movie buff, for a lot of reasons; one reason is I can’t seem to focus my attention on one thing for 2 hours straight, and this movie lasted for 2.5 hours, although even the second half seemed like 2.5 hours.
And for some reason I thought the movie ended with some monoliths on the moon. When I finally raised my eyes and looked, the movie ended with a shot of a fetus. Huh?
You need to see it in Cinerama. The small screen destroys the SFX, the heart of the film. That may look trite today, but it was all stunning when it was released.
Dave is reborn inside the monolith as one of the advanced lifeforms who were behind human evolution, fwiw.
Just as the monolith transformed “Moon Watcher” and his band of proto-humans, it transformed Dave into “Star Child”. He could travel across the universe at will-- the next step in human evolution. (I read the book, which I believe, was publish concurrently with the movie, or just after it.)
ETA: I think the Special Effects hold up remarkably well. The female fashion wear… not so much.
I’ve watched in many times over the years.
I’d say I have always appreciated it and have always respected its place in cinema history.
I watched it most recently a few months ago and for the very first time I loved it.
This was probably my 7th or 8th viewing over about 20 years and, for the very first time, I loved it. Something finally just clicked for me. The pacing, the interconnectedness of the music with the visuals, the beautiful silences, the balance and juxtaposition of the mundane and the awe-inspiring …it all just clicked for me.
After 7 or 8 viewings over the course of 20 years.
It is slow, especially by 2014 standards. Kubrick really needed an editor! The same director who had a jump cut through a million years could have trimmed a few minute from several dragged out scenes. OTOH, HAL’s death scene is one of the most chilling in cinema. It’s also a movie that does not give you all the answers. The sequel does, and is a lesser film for it. Ben Bova said about 2001 that it lives up to the spirit of science fiction, because it makes the audience think.
I have to agree with the OP the used to show with once a year on ABC way back when I was a kid also being a huge science fiction fan I could not get through it. a friend of mine forced me to watch it a couple years ago when all is said and done I thought to myself, this is a movie that a lot of critics ranked in the top 20 movies ever made?
The most boring movie ever, that I’ve seen, would have to be Away from Her. By comparison, 2001 is a rip-roaring swashbuckler of a film.
If watching paint dry is a 1 and the movie, Crank, is a 10 and we say the average excitingness of life level is a 5 (so something like chatting with friends over lunch), then 2001 probably comes in somewhere around a 4.5. Away from Her is more like a 1.5.
Before 2001, the vehicles in space movies almost never resembled what we actually ended up with. Have a look at the films of the 1950s – George Pal’s Destination Moon, When Worlds Collide, Conquest of Space, the Disneyland films about Werner von Braun’s plans to move out into space, Men Into Space things like the British Quatermass series. Spaceships were all smooth-curved things with sharp edges on their fins and smooth bullet profiles. Space stations looked like they were made out of balloons (because the plan was that they essentially were.
But in 20012 the ships looked as if they were made from real materials – they had bumps and external rectangular attachments. One critic (much later) described the style as “rockets dipped in glue and rolled in model kits” – which isn’t far from the truth – they DID use parts from plastic models, reportedly, in fabricating those models. The “Space Clipper” really did look like a practical reusable ship (it resembles a stretched-out Space Shuttle, years before the public ever saw a shuttle). The Moon ship was a sphere with all kinds of protrusions. The Discovery ship resembled ones that Clarke had written about in his 1950s stories. The space pods looked prtactical. And not a rocket flame in sight. In fact, the use of classical music to underscore the smooth motion of the craft (Strauss’ Blue Danube and Lygety’s music) was – as Kubrick said – “as far away from the cliché of Space Music as you could get”*.
Al in all, it was a COMPLETELY different experience than seeing spaceflight in the movies ever had been. It looked different, as plausible as the Gemini and Apollo craft being put into orbit at the time, and completely adult.
When I first saw it on the screen, it blew me away. With the wide-screen added in, it was a totally immersive experience, and unlike anything I’d ever seen. 2001 – which to me embodies the best of 1950s science fiction – immediately became a contender with Forbidden Planet (the best example of 1940’s written science fiction – the movies are always at least a decade behind the times) for Best SF film. All these years later, these two are still battling it out at the top of my list.
*Kubrick used classical music as a “placeholder” while filming, before the score was written. Alex North – who had scored Kubrick’s Spartacus – wrote and recorded an entire new score, which Kubrick didn’t use. The original recording has been lost, but the score has been re-recorded and released.
I would differentiate between boring (which I do not think applies to 2001) and slow or methodical (which I do think apply).
There are certainly scenes that take much longer than they need to advance the plot from A to B to C. There’s no denying that, even among people who love the movie.
However, I feel like that slow, methodical pacing is an important element in getting the audience involved. I have time to think about what’s happening and to feel it in a way that a faster pace might deny.
I do have to agree with the people who say that you can’t understand the movie unless you’re familiar with the book. The movie can be enjoyed without it (I loved it from the very first time I saw it, even without having read the books) but you simply can’t understand everything you see without more context. To some extent, I also like that; there’s something to be said for sci-fi in which the audience shares some of the confusion of the characters involved.
I remember watching this movie with my dad (80’s VCR). I too was a little “WTF?” at the ending.
The next day my dad brought home the book. I was never much of a reader as a kid. In fact, I found it to be a chore. After a little bit of prodding from my father, I started reading the book and was unable to put the damn thing down.
It was the first book I ever read as a child that I didn’t consider to be a chore. But yeah, reading the book definitely makes watching the movie more enjoyable.
Last year I had to sit through it six times in six days when we were rehearsing and performing the film score live for screenings. It’s very boring. It seemed to get longer and increasingly incomprehensible at each viewing.
I’m with the OP. And I did see it in a widescreen theater when it opened. And I read the book. The book makes it explicable but not any less somnolent.
I watched it recently and could not believe the immensity of the dullness.
Other things that I, at least, got from the movie without needing to have explained:
The exploration of what it means to be human. This is nicely highlighted by the fact that the most “personable” character in the film is the computer. The men speak robotically, and show little emotional affect. They’re more interested in posing for a picture in front of the monolith than they are in the monolith itself!
The exploration of birth. It’s the little girl’s birthday, and Poole’s birthday, and, at the end, the space child is being born. (Also, Discovery falling toward Jupiter evokes a sperm and an egg.)
The role of aggression in human survival. The ape-man being given the gift of murderous aggression…and the space weapons we have created to express that gift. Hal acquires this horrible gift, and uses it on Poole. Bowman uses it on Hal.
The movie is an exploration of human nature. Nobody should need to have this explained to them.
