Still a great movie! Why? Discuss!
Still a great movie! Why? Discuss!
Every time I watch it I find new symbolisms I had not seen. We ran this at the theater when I was a youngster so I got to watch it a lot.
I put it in the category of movies that are too long, too quiet and too slow. When a scene spends 2 minutes in silence, zooming into something, with nothing but a musical score playing...I get bored. Eyes Wide Shut was the same thing. Long, drawn out dialog scenes interspersed with 2 hours of plinky-plink piano music playing over footage of Tom Cruise walking down the street. Yawn. I get that there is an artistic expression going on there, but it is lost on me. (The exception was The Shining. Same basic Kubrick format of a lot of nothing going on, but it worked for that story.)
In reply to pinchvalve:
I was thinking the same thing. Visually a lot of the scenes look great but, boring! And I too liked The Shining.
I liked it, but I gotta agree it moves too slow. Hard to believe it came from the same director who did Dr. Strangelove and Clockwork Orange. It was cool in another way: it's one of the first movies with big time product placement.
Meh, I'm not a huge Kubrick fan. I know this is heresy but I hated The Shining. 2001 was beautifully made, but (just like the book) the whole second half makes absolutely zero sense. It could have been a great, atmospeheric sf thriller. Instead it just goes off the rails. That's not really Kubrick's fault, though; it's the source material.
I didn't see it until about 5 years after it was released. When I did see it I think the main thing I liked about it is that it took space travel as "matter of fact". 45 years later we may just now be arriving at that point. We've had to take a lot of time to go back to picking up the bones to club each other over the head with. As planned, the rich have gotten richer . . . and I won't continue this sentence . . . . Who knows, maybe the bots could do a better job.
I didn't see the movie until after I'd read the book. Reading the book first allows you to sort of "fill in the blank spaces" in the movie.
Still (sadly) one of the most accurate depictions of space travel / space related activities (yes, I am including Gravity which falls well short).
Also, probably the most accurate (closest) depiction of the future. It obviously missed a bit, but not as wildly far off as most movies (e.g. Blade Runner, Terminator etc.)
Yes, it is a slow movie, but it really has to be put in perspective of the movies of the time. They were way slower back then, that is just how it was. Some of the "twitch" movies of today can be a bit much (wild over use of super action saturated CGI is getting really bad)
I thought the movie was pretty dull compared to the book. In fact, without having read the book first, you would miss most of what was going on in the movie.
I just want to see it in 70mm without driving to California or Toronto.
My parents saw it when if first came out - in Tokyo. Can you imagine what it would do to your head to walk out of that movie into 1968 Tokyo?
I love it. It's really three movies, and the long shots don't bother me. You just have to sink into it. But yeah, the last part is a brain smoker.
I always felt Honda missed out on a great minivan marketing opportunity in 2001.
Can someone please explain what-the-berkeley is going on at the end? Is it my fault for watching it at too young an age?
I vaguely remember making it about a third of the way into that movie and turning it off. I really don't like most artistic movies. Blow E36 M3 up, crash something or make me laugh. And make sure the girls are cute. 
I really appreciate the movie, and wish I knew what the hell was going on through the last…1/2? 1/3rd??? It just gets so weird there…
Appleseed wrote: Can someone please explain what-the-berkeley is going on at the end? Is it my fault for watching it at too young an age?
Like I said, you really need to read the book. Now, it's been about 30 years since I read it or saw the movie, so this is from Deep Thought, but he goes to that moon of Jupiter, Io, and there's an alien built "subway station" kinda thing that transports him somewhere where they turn him into a pure energy being. Then he goes back to earth as a child form of a pure energy being (kind of like a dog compared to the aliens that did it to him, the same ones that put the beacon on the other side of the moon) and he stops a nuclear war just as he gets back to the earth. The End. Read teh book.
In reply to aircooled:
What I really like about 2001 is that not a single frame of that movie is computer generated, and it all looks believable, even today.
I haven't been on enough drugs to make it through the whole movie.
Dr. Hess wrote:Appleseed wrote: Can someone please explain what-the-berkeley is going on at the end? Is it my fault for watching it at too young an age?Like I said, you really need to read the book. Now, it's been about 30 years since I read it or saw the movie, so this is from Deep Thought, but he goes to that moon of Jupiter, Io, and there's an alien built "subway station" kinda thing that transports him somewhere where they turn him into a pure energy being. Then he goes back to earth as a child form of a pure energy being (kind of like a dog compared to the aliens that did it to him, the same ones that put the beacon on the other side of the moon) and he stops a nuclear war just as he gets back to the earth. The End. Read teh book.
+1. Probably more than any other movie, this movie pretty much requires the viewer to have read the book first to get the most out of it.
In a way, it's kind of a shame. They don't make movies like this anymore - ones that really require the viewer to do their homework.
Instead of the movie being based off a book Arthur C. Clarke and Kubrick developed the movie together, basing it loosely on an earlier Clarke story called The Sentinel and Clarke basically wrote the book while the movie was being filmed. And yeah it helps to read the book first, some of the ideas are really complex and difficult to get across otherwise.
2001 is the only Kubrick film I will watch....and even it is flawed enough to make me want to grab a femur and start smacking him upside the head.
FWIW, I thought that 2010 was a better book. If you've read it, nothing in the sci-fi film Europa Report is even slightly surprising. (Still a good film)
Dr. Hess wrote:Appleseed wrote: Can someone please explain what-the-berkeley is going on at the end? Is it my fault for watching it at too young an age?Like I said, you really need to read the book. Now, it's been about 30 years since I read it or saw the movie, so this is from Deep Thought, but he goes to that moon of Jupiter, Io, and there's an alien built "subway station" kinda thing that transports him somewhere where they turn him into a pure energy being. Then he goes back to earth as a child form of a pure energy being (kind of like a dog compared to the aliens that did it to him, the same ones that put the beacon on the other side of the moon) and he stops a nuclear war just as he gets back to the earth. The End. Read teh book.
I reread the book last year. Doc has it right. The beginning and end both make sense after reading the book. Otherwise it's just trippy. Which made it appeal to a different crowd when it was first released...
JoeyM wrote: 2001 is the only Kubrick film I will watch....
You REALLY need to watch:
and at least the first half of this:
In reply to aircooled:
Agreed. Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket are must-see films. I saw the latter in the theater with my father - the only time we ever saw a movie together.
Kubrick was definitely a cutting edge kind of guy.
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