What is so good about 2001 a space odyssey the movie?

Question

just watched it for the first time on the weekend and i'm surpriesed a sat through the whole thing it was so boring i understood the movie but why does this movie have such a good rep it was number 40 on AFI list of best movies why?

Answer 1

It was landmark in it's just being way far out.  Man.

Answer 2

When you're high and you time the last 13 minutes of the movie with the song Echos by Pink Floyd it is amazing!!  Try it next Saturday.  Make sure you get good weed.

Answer 3

yes its a boring movie. just the concept that a computer would eventually control the lives of people was considered groundbreaking. the confrontation between man and machine where the man begs for his life sums it all up.  

Answer 4

It was the first modern space film to hit cinemas.  To put it into context for you, the film was released BEFORE we landed on the moon.  Kubrik and his team had to GUESS how the Earth would look from space because there were NO SATELLITES OR PHOTOGRAPHS yet.

The vision displayed in this d**n near spot on portrayal of our future existence and human behavior is spot on.

Watch it a couple more times and it will start to grow on you, you will begin to realize why it is regarded as such a classic.

Answer 5

Keep in mind they did not have digital anything in 1968 and it was during the Vietnam War.  2001 made people think.  And in a time when science fiction was a joke, movies were badly made and who cared if they made any money, as long as Dropo the Martian got his gig as Santa Claus, then the world was happy.  You have spaceships that were cheap model kits and blue propane torches or worse, pieces of flapping cloth for the ship's thrust.  

Then came 2001, A Space Odyssey.  The Discovery was a 50 foot model run on a section of track.  The space station and Pan Am orbiter were scientifically accurate for the time, and even the dashboard graphics today still look great.  PDA's were much larger of course.  ;c)  

And we though $1.25 for a video call to Earth was laughably outrageous!  

As far as space flicks go, it was also the most realistically portrayed given the information they had.  Micro-gravity, explosive decompression, no sound transmission in space, etc.

Compare this to what the real Year 2001 brought us.  Stupid dumbsh*t terrorists, bad computer operating systems, cars that still touch rubber to broken concrete, inflation, economy in the toilet, ah yes, it was definitely science FICTION.

Edit:  Plus the HAL-9000 computer thing has been copied, imitated, satirized, and spoofed countless times, even today.  But I don't know if that's because of the concept, or because originality in Hollywood is a forgotten concept these days.

Answer 6

a couple of reasons... first and foremost.. it was an amazing piece of science fiction to be created PRIOR to a man being put on the moon. think about it.. this movie was created in 1967 and put out in 1968 and we had hardly even BEEN to space.. here they are depicting (mostly accurately) how things would work in the future.. 2nd .. stanley kubrick did it.. and the AFI people love him.. (watch full metal jacket and a clockwork orange if you wanna see his BEST work)

keep in mind in those space scenes where its all quiet and all you you hear is breathing? thats what space REALLY sounds like.. you can't here X-wings blast past you and hook hard left turns as IF they were in the air... its space.. you need thrusters .. there is no sound. boring.. perhaps.. accurate tho..

the guy who wrote it... arthur clarke he believed that in 2001 we would have been exactly where that movie showed us, and he suggested that the main reason we didn't get to that level of technology is because we wasted hundreds of billions of dollars on vietnam, grenada, cold war, gulf war I ...etc etc etc ..

read the book.. and then read 2010  and 2051 .. then go see 2010 .. it'll make much more sense... truth is. the space shots in 2010 weren't as good as they were in 2001 .

also keep in mind at the time.. there were no computers.. there were no computer graphics.. everything even the computer screens depicted in the movie.. were drawn by hand, and then made to appear on flat screens.. which didn't even exist..  

Answer 7

You have to take it in the context of the time it came out. It was one of those seminal films that changed the way folks looked at things.  It loses a lot of its oomph so many years after the fact, but I saw it when it first came out and it was absolutely mind blowing at the time.  There was nothing else like it.  

Answer 8

I'll be damned if I know and I've spent nights walking the floor for the past 40 ears trying to figure it out. I saw it and was bored stiff as a plank(being stoned on weed didn't help any either). In my opinion,it's an over produced over rated piece of shite and i don't care if I never see it again

Answer 9

What does it matter? For you, it meant little. That's cool. Be your own person.

Answer 10

no way!!!

Answer 11

Stargate sequence period.

AMAZING