Is it wrong that I just watched the first 20 minutes of 2001 (for the first time), said, “Meh,” and turned it off?
Not really, I guess. It’s a pretty old film, and the pacing is languidly artsy-fartsy. But it is a really good film. It gets good after awhile.
“SlyFrog, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.”
Yeah, 2001 is very slow and very Kubrick. It can be a chore, and the payoff is arguably not much of a payoff these days. But you did miss the best parts.
-TomDefinitely worth watching at least once. Actually, you could say that about most of Kubrick’s films.
The middle of 2001 is very good.
The beginning was also very good in the pre-Star Wars era, when it presented a sense of wonder that hadn’t yet been seen a billion times.
There are so many classic movies that I have never seen. I have never been a movie watcher I guess. Well, Netflix is changing that. Raging Bull, the French Connection, etc. So great.
Interestingly, I think I read some here say that the French Connection does not stand up as well with time either (that in the modern day, it is pretty much just another cop drama). For some reason though, that one kept me enthralled. The story was pretty standard, but the shots of New York still hold up, and are even more fascinating now for being a look into the 70s.
The ending FREAKED ME THE FUCK OUT when I was a little kid. Something about the weird monolith noise, the old man, and the star child just terrified me. For months I would periodically have to sleep with the lights on because I was afraid the monolith would appear and eat me or something. I don’t think I’ve actually seen the movie since then, and I definitely never saw 2010. Loved all the books though (even the kind of crappy 2061 and 3001).
OK Daniel, what was your old nick?
What a coincidence, I watched the movie this afternoon. The latter half and in particular the last chapter of the movie are intriguing and awe inspiring.
Orpheo
The glacial pacing definitely gets in the way of it being as watchable as it could be, but it’s definitely worth sitting through once.
^___^ thx
The very beginning…not so hot, but worth sticking with.
The middle…pure awesome with rock sauce.
The end…basically after he lands on the monolith (OMG SPOILAR) the rest is not worth watching, at least not more than once. The light show is boring, except for the false color stuff, which is just dumb and ugly. The stuff after that point…not really a payoff for anything that has come before.
I love the movie, and I love Kubrick. I just can’t get too excited about the stuff at the end.
Someone should just redo the graphics at the end with CG and we’d all be good to go.
Let’s have Dave go through a wormhole and end up in an imaginary version of Pensacola.
“My God, it’s full of… Dad?”
I thought 2001 was basically a bad movie, but worth watching the 5 minutes or so of dialogue with HAL. Note I did not say “…worth watching for the 5 minutes…”
My only thoughts after the movie were, “Damn, that’s 2 hours I’ll never get back.”
I have a love/hate with Kubrick’s stuff, and this one was definitely hate.
Me too. I populated my Netflix queue with a bunch of classics and it’s a nice surprise when they show up after I’ve lost track of what’s coming out. I’ve caught up on Chinatown, Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver, Fargo, The Seven Samurai, Raging Bull, and Dr. Strangelove. I also saw Citizen Kane, though I have to admit that it just seemed like one Simpsons reference after another.
Almost without exception I’ve enjoyed all these older movies. Some of them are just very different and unlike any of the new movies I see coming out now.
Much love for Fargo and Dr. Strangelove.
Not that anyone needs to do this, or anything, but the film does get better with repeated viewings, as you understand more about the film. My favorite points:
-The film frames primitive man (or the arguably more intelligent, more tribe/family-oriented species thereof) as withering on the vine, as they have not developed the killing instinct. The fallout of this is getting pwnd at Ye Olde Wat’ring Holle, not taking advantage of all the tasty meat grazing around them, and failing to fend off nocturnal sabre-toothed predators. So ze monolith, acting as some higher extraterrestrial lifeform, imparts the aggression needed to be a hunter and aggressor. Ok, that’s the easy part.
-Now, the hard part is the aliens know what the potential side effects of sparking such a violent spirit within the souls of primitive man will be. It will, in time, turn them into xenophobic homicidal maniacs. Heh, ooops! So they bury another monolith in the moon, one that can only be found if some local outward-thinking race possesses the necessary tech skillz to find it by its magnetic signature and uncover it so sunlight can trigger its easily-trackable warning alert signal to where the larger, spacegate-monolith is parked.
-See, it’s a two-step process in the end. One, can we get to the moon and find the buried monolith and then two, are we capable of spaceflight to Jupiter? The notion is if we can construct spacececraft capable of flying all the way out to Jupiter and landing on the moon, then we possess the necessary space tech to reach the spacegate and send an emissary through it.
-The aliens underestimated the human paranoid xenophobic spirit, however. They didn’t think we’d send out a mission on a ship helmed by an AI that was given secret orders (it is revealed in 2010 that the orders, which were meant to be more innocent than they subsequently became in execution, were submitted by Heywood Floyd, the guy you see flying to the moon in the opening space segment of 2001 - he’s played by William Sylvester in 2001 and Roy Scheider in the aggressively mediocre 2010) to confound the crew with bogus equipment failures should something actually be discovered at the coordinates corresponding to the moonbound monolith’s signal. See, the hope was that we’d find nothing, chalk it up to a Big Mystery, and go home. Alas, that was not to be, and now HAL is left to figure out Plan B. But the hazards of HAL’s AI as crafted by such a paranoid, etc. race of beings leads to eventual near-total disaster. HAL eventually uses the same violent logic the ancestors of his creators did to solve his problems. Also, notice Dave is only able to successfully explore the stargate monolith after he “kills” HAL.
-There’s more minutae that I have fixated on, but that requires reading the novels and even though they are a decent read, me referencing any of it in this thread will be sort of puzzling and obtuse.