Space Odyssey: 2001
Posted by Michael Robinson on February 10, 2007
This is where a spoiler warning might go, but I honestly don’t know that there’s anything to spoil. I was about 25 minutes from the end and there really wasn’t any plot progression.
I gave Space Odyssey: 2001 an honest shot – I watched most of it before I got sick of the drug-out scenes. This movie had great potential, and was completely ruined by what appeared to me as some weak attempt at giving it artistic value. It had artistic value, no question about that. For the time, and even now, the art direction was great. It was very realistic, from the way stars weren’t visible when the ship was in focus, to the motion of the characters in space.
It should not have taken the monkey people 30 minutes to find the obelisk, and another 15 to be changed by it. It should not take 5 minutes for HAL to kill the crew. It should not take 30 minutes to go from “Hey look, Jupiter!” to “Whoa, mindtrip!”.
That was the last I saw – I had to switch to something else before I passed out. The only time where the stretching-out was appropriate was the scene where the guy was disconnecting HAL. That’s an appropriate use of suspense.
It could be condensed in to a 90 minute movie by cutting some of the scenes to about 25% of their length (which wouldn’t lose any suspense or content), and it would be an enjoyable movie.
