Here’s a version for the modern audience: Speedrun: Space Odyssey 2001 in 60 seconds (Ep#13) - YouTube
When I saw it for something like the fourth time a few years back the primitive hominid scene seemed agonizingly slow. Far too dragged out to be necessary, even with all that developed. The rest of the slow pacing didn’t bother me. It seemed more justified, I suppose.
But I first saw it in 1969. Things were very different then. I think I and others were used to fairly long, ponderous scenes in television shows and even longer ones in movies.
I seem to recall one early Bond movie with Connery shown in a hotel at night, walking about and pondering the mysteries of what was going on. He may have stepped outside for a while, and walked past an unoccupied swimming pool, although I’m not sure of that much.
Remember there was no CGI in 1968. The SFX would take a serious CGI budget even today, but it was all models and props, made extremely detailed for closeup shots too. Compare that to the cardboard sets and cheap models hung from string that were state of the art for SF at the time, for instance ST:TOS, and you can get some idea about how astounding it all was to see for the first time.
I remember seeing some photos of the giant hamster wheel set that represented the crew quarters on Discovery, made just to show Frank jogging around it. They couldn’t hide the track for the moving camera, so it was made to be just a feature of the cylindrical floor. A similar set was made for the Clipper stewardess to walk around, on her Velcro-soled shoes. Pan Am was just one of the many companies with logos on the space station that didn’t survive even to 2001. 
Huh? That’s one of my favorite films.
I’ve seen 2001 dozens of times, including twice in Cinerama when it opened. The only time I ever fell asleep was at a Con when I was lying on the floor and had been up for about 20 hours. Yes, it was made for Cinerama and was even more impressive there.
Back in 1968 we had longer attention spans. And fewer remote controls. You could build up to something without the watcher switching to five other channels or the web.
As John said, the book came out right after the movie. However I understood the movie fine before I read the book. It helped to have read all of Clarke’s novels and most of his non-fiction. What happens to Dave is similar to what happens to the children at the climax of Childhood’s End.
A cosmonaut, I think Yuri Gagarin, said that 2001 was the closest thing he had seen to really being in space. That made Clarke happy.
Dave was reborn inside the monolith in 3001. In the book, and clearly in the movie, the monolith was a stargate which brought him to a “zoo” which had been set up to resemble his habitat (a hotel room) where he moved to the next stage of evolution. He made himself a baby because he was so new at it.
ETA: Agree about small screen. Anyone watching 2001 on a phone should be whipped. 
Clarke was done with the novel well before the movie was ready. The Clarke biography notes that he was peeved at not being able to release it until the movie came out, because he needed the money. That’s why he still had them going to Saturn in the book, which was the original plan, changed when Kubrick and the special effects team couldn’t get a realistic looking Saturn to film.
The story I heard was that it would add too much length to the film to show a grav slingshot around Jupiter on the way to Iapetus (the most mysterious moon of Saturn or of any planet back then).
It’s interesting to note the number of Jovian moons Clarke “predicted” as having been discovered by then. A check of the dates counting how many moons had actually been discovered by 2001 turns out to be pretty close, as I recall.
Incorrect, HAL became psychotic because of a conflict in his programing. HAL was designed to be truthful at all times. Yet when the mission to investigate the monolith orbiting Jupiter was added to Discovery’s already planned mission only HAL was informed of the new mission and was told to keep it secret until they were in orbit of Jupiter. HAL’s solution to the conflict was to kill the crew.
Never heard that - and I have lots of books on this movie. There is a somewhat similar scene in 2010 where they brake - but that was for excitement. No excitement in the slingshot maneuver. Clarke put it in to explain it - and also because this maneuver was not as well known in this pre-Voyager the probe era - but I don’t see why Kubrick would do anything but show them arriving at Saturn. I’m also sure he had a good handle on pages to running time.
It was quite the experience when it first came out. But when I saw it again on a big screen in 1983, I was bored shitless.
2001 literally bored me to tears. I actually had tears roll down my face as I thought of all the better things I could have done with my time. I was pretty miserable by the time we finally got to the flying-through-trippy-multicolor-inverted-landscapes thing.
I don’t need 10 minute shots of people slowly walking upside down to understand that yes, we CAN make a movie about space that’s totally realistic. I’d rather have likable characters and a coherent plot that isn’t a trite “human evolution beyond imagining; a higher power awakens us to the infinite possibilities of spacetime” thing.
I imagine if I got a boner just from imagining and watching incredibly realistic spaceflight, the way train hobbyists get over train sims, I’d love it. But I don’t, so 2001 is long and boring.
In terms of other similar movies, Solaris actually clicked with me after a while. It took me a long way through the movie until I realized what the incredibly long zoom in/out shots were about though. I’d never encountered an idea like that in movies before. But I don’t know if I could ever stand watching it again regardless.
You watched it unstoned?
Something had to be the first. 2001 was it. Yes, you know that about films today in 2014, but it wasn’t known in 1968.
It *was *the Sixties.
Did you read Lem’s story? That made it make much more sense. The Tarkovsky film (I haven’t seen Clooney’s) took a long time to get to the point about the planet itself being sentient.
IMO the middle section with HAL is quite absorbing. The first and last sections are pretentious pap.
I had not read the book, but I already knew that the plot point was that the planet was sentient, so I had that going for me there. (and yes, I am talking of the Tarkovsky film)
I realized after a while that the slow panning shots and the zoom in/outs were there to let you really REALLY think about how freaked out this character was right now. How completely wrong everything is. All those questions and thoughts running through your head? Those are going through his head. We’re going to use this long shot to let you wallow in them a while because that’s what you’d be doing in his shoes.
I’d never encountered a movie that actually gave you the time to sit there and go nuts at the same rate as the characters.
I’m surprised any of those proper exist. Kubrick was a stickler for deliberately destroying the props precisely so they wouldn’t become museu m exhibits. That’s why the Discovery on that page ios a replica, and why they had to build everything from scratch for 2010 (even the plans had bewen destroyed).
Here are pictures of the remains of the Space Station prop, in a field:
That’s a damned shame, CM, even tho I grok why Kubrick did it. If I was walking idly by and saw that, I’d just assume it was the remains of some flower planter or water wheel or such, never in a million years considering that it was once a movie prop for one of the most notable films ever made.
Kids today don’t do the cool drugs.
What I had read may have been mistaken, then.
Do you remember where you read it? I try to collect as much as I can find on it. I even have a memoir by the mime who played Moonwatcher.