2001: A Space Odyssey
I think this has been over-hyped. At the time the special effects would have had its audience completely in awe, but looking past the technical achievements the film's greatest strength is probably in its sound design. The use of classical orchestral pieces was a stroke of genius, particularly the piece used whenever the black monolith appears (I need to look up what that piece was, there was something genuinely disquieting about the chorus of voices, like a chorus of Hell).
Spoiler (click to read)
This was probably done best with the apes, where they wake up one morning and suddenly the black monolith, seen for the first time, is standing over them. Considering I went into the film not knowing what it was going to be about, or that there was even going to be an alien presence, this was quite a shock, and the music heightened the tension in a really triumphant way.
However, there were a few issues with the story and with pacing. I don't mean there were plot holes, I just mean that it was difficult to care about any of the characters. The way it jumps from one set of characters to another and then to another without any real sense of closure (in the middle section in particular) makes it a struggle to really get a sense of where the film is trying to go, or what it's trying to say, or who/what we are actually trying to follow. Maybe the difference in average attention spans then/now has something to do with that, but certainly from my point of view I found large chunks of the story to be dissatisfying.
I'm afraid that includes the end.
Spoiler (click to read)
While the wormhole sequence was very well done, and its message was very clear, the final sequence in the aliens' collection became truly pretentious (not quite as badly as Solaris, for this sequence still had some genuinely well-thought-out inferred meaning) in the way various metaphors were visually constructed, and in my opinion it ends the film on a really morose note. Yes, it's clear that Dave has been granted all of this knowledge by the godlike aliens, but he's still just their experiment, and when he is returned to Earth it's in a form which can be argued is no longer even him, or is him but transformed in such a way that he cannot return to his old life.
Maybe I'm just being odd, but while the film was a technical marvel, even by today's standards, it still didn't gel with me. I'm not saying it's a bad film, because it's clearly not, but I feel that it's over-hyped and given more kleos than it deserves. Yes it's good, no it's not the epitome of sci-fi as a genre.
What was nice was finally getting about a million references from other media. There's so much of 2001 in everything: Interstellar, Star Wars, Moon, even The LEGO Movie and some of the Connery-era Bonds.
"Nothing goes down 'less I'm involved. No nuggets. No onion rings. No nothin'. A cheeseburger gets sold in the park, I want in! You got fat while we starved on the streets...now it's my turn!" -Harley Morenstein
