Review of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) by Addi S — 13 Apr 2016

Space odyssey was the worst movie that I have ever seen in my whole life. It is a slow boring movie that has the no interesting story to it. I feel like I was forced to watch the most boring movie in the world and then write a couple pages about it. This movie was very confusing and I bet that everyone's first time watching they wouldn't be able to understand a thing. The only reason our class understood it was because we had a teacher to help us better understand it. I would never recommend this movie to anyone accept for people that like to be bored to death. Not only did the story suck but the directing was awful. The whole movie was slow and made me feel frustrated to get to the point. There was also a bunch of weird scenes that were showed too long and had annoying music along with it that made no sense. Maybe I'm missing something about the movie but overall it was trash.

This story had a lame plot that was stretched way too much. The only thing that was interesting was how the astronauts went on a mysterious mission. The computer that controlled the ship they were flying was called HAL. It started showing weird behaviors towards the mission and thought the pilots were turning against him or hiding something from him. HAL then kills the doctors on the ship and begins to not respond to the pilots making a lot of trouble for them to complete the mission. This ends with a pilot shutting HAL down after being out of control. This short story was almost 3 hours long so I would imagine you could understand how slow and boring it was. Also throughout the movie an odd black figure shows up in a bunch of different scenes and it was supposed to symbolize the past and the future. It showed up in scenes with monkeys that were making annoying noises, in a rich mansion and in the galaxy. As you can see it was trying to symbolize evolution in a very boring way.

Did the actors portray their role of the original short story and did they fulfill my expectations? Not one bit. After reading the short story I was actually interested in the movie because I like the idea of space missions and figuring out mysteries that could possibly have to do with aliens. I expected a lot of action and interesting scenes but all I got was a stretched out story of people pretending to float in space. The actors were horrible and I didn't see any personalities or anything interesting from them. They were boring and barely even spoke and when they did it was not important and very slow. I feel as if they could have made this story just as good if there weren't any actors in it at all.

Even though the story was bad, the director still used a good amount of film techniques but I feel that he used them poorly. In many scenes he made it seem that they were in a space ship that had no gravity in it, but you could also tell it was fake. Also he built up suspense in some scenes very well with music that got louder and at one point when there was a loud ringing noise that set the mood. When they showed the scene with the astronauts taking a picture with the black object, the director used loud noises to make audience feel like they are living in the movie. There were many close ups on peoples faces and very loud breathing to also set the mood. Many wide shot camera angles were used to make the ship feel empty. The director could have used more film techniques but other than that, the ones he used were not bad.

This movie didn't really follow along with the short story that much. I definitely expected other things to happen that didn't and I also thought the movie was going to be good because the short story was very interesting. I think it could've been better if it wasn't so stretched out and directed the way it was. If it was put into somebody else's hand it could have been better. So thing I expected was to see was humans flying to the moon and finding a small and dangerous object that had to do with aliens and the universe. Nothing interesting like that happened though. I feel like the movie should've brought me to the edge of my seat but it was a missed opportunity.

I would never recommend this movie to anyone, especially kids. Kids would never to be able to understand it and they aren't interested in a long boring movie. If this was not 2016 and it was about 50 years earlier I feel that it would be more interesting. Overall I would not tell someone to see this movie today.