Review of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) by Akminds — 18 Aug 2020

I just wasted over 2 hours watching this guff.

The first 5 minutes was LITERALLY nothing. A black screen with some noises. We're already off to a great start if I'm having to fast forward through the intro.

The movie begins with some apes having a fight, finding a big Tetris piece and then freaking out. This part went on for far too long! 20 minutes into the film and we finally get to the space part. VERY slow shots of ships passing and spinning, once again nothing at all happening. And then some characters have a meeting, it's all very boring... Then they go to the moon 45 minutes in and see the Tetris piece from the ape bit before with slightly different context... I say slightly different as there's NO CONTEXT FOR EITHER! It's just Tetris block as ape or Tetris block as human. The humans try to take a photo of it and then it makes an awful racket and suddenly everything that had happened for the last hour did not matter in the slightest!

We're at the part even people who know nothing about the movie know. HAL, this part had so much potential but it wasn't related to anything that came before it and it ended before it had the chance to explore it's full potential and make the plot work. Instead of being a big villain, HAL is beaten is about 4 minutes with no real fight or struggle, the entire time the movie is driving me insane with it's poor use of sound effects and strobe lighting. The movie gave me a migraine and that's no exaggeration. The lights on screen flashing, the repetitive noises were over the top and made this movie a nightmare for me.

Oh by the way, when we're introduced to HAL and Dave and the other bloke we're completely taken away from the other cast. No one sticks around, it's like having a James Bond film where 45 minutes in James Bond is just not heard from again and we have to follow a bunch of other people instead and they're not having a Martini shaken not stirred and finding the bad guy, they're instead playing table tennis and we're expected to continue watching like everything is fine.

Anyway, after this part the film flashed up an INTERMISSION screen for a very long time, I was debating whether or not to get myself a choc-ice at this point... And then we resume and after the HAL stuff happened the main guy gets attacked by more RGB lights than every Instagram post combined and then the film goes so far up it's own arse it becomes pretentious. The film explains nothing, says screw you and just ends with the main guy getting old and dying but becoming some reborn alien baby. WHAT!? I don't even have words for this, it's utter nonsense.

The film has some incredible visuals for 1968 but the extremely slow pace, shots that just don't end, interesting plot points that don't get explored enough and pacing I could only describe as Grandma who's memory is degrading explaining something she once experienced, focusing in on every little detail for the points that don't matter and aren't interesting but anything with potential and excitement squandered away.

This movie is a disaster, it's not a case of me not getting it and anyone who comes at me saying this cannot accept criticism. This is not a masterpiece, this is just a pretentious wankfest for pompous media students who think they're above everyone else for watching a film that was trying to have "meaning.