[DHerion]

While somewhat interesting the film is really a big bore. The film should have been cut by 50%.

[IronJack]

I have to agree. Yeah, I get it. It’s cerebral. So is “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” And they’re both boring as hell.

[alexander_busek]

Consider the typical sci-fi films of the 50s and 60s: Monsters in rubber costumes, rocketships suspended on marginally visible wires "whooshing" audibly through space, rayguns, musical scores dominated by theramins, space stations manned by square-jawed jocks named "Steve" and "Bill" wearing gray-flannel spacesuits and making condescending remarks about the "four-eyed female scientist," overly earnest narrators making pronouncements about the "far-flung year of 1975" - and then consider "2001: A Space Odyssey." The only other films that came close to it were "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and "Forbidden Planet." The opening credits, alone - with the alignment of the Moon, Earth, and Sun to the overture of Richard Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" - surpassed anything which the genre had offered up till then.

I concede that, if you were expecting and demanded a traditional story with a plot that was wrapped up neatly by the end, it wasn't the movie for you. But please allow at least that it was in a class by itself.

Regards,

[wagglebee]

While somewhat interesting the film is really a big bore. The film should have been cut by 50%.

That could be said about pretty much every movie Kubrick ever made.

[sparklite2]

I saw 2001 in a theater when it was first released. A group of friends got whacked out and sat together. During the stargate sequence, we were all blown away. One of the girls in our group was sitting in front of me. She turned around to me and said, “I love you,” then turned back around and watched the rest of the movie. I can’t even remember who she was...

[FroggyTheGremlim]

In the first part of the movie, when the pre-human, after killing his adversary, tosses the bone in the air and instantly it becomes the spaceship, sends tingles down my leg each time I see it - the entire history of human tool utilization in a single instant.

The second part, with the various ships traveling to the moonbase to the "Blue Danube," also touches me for its sheer beauty, grace and movement.

The trip to Jupiter with "Hal" is a bore.

The end sequence with all those slitscreens and colored oil-in-water shots, was 30 minutes of my life wasted.

But the closing scene - the "star-child" will stay in my mind forever.

All-in-all, the movie is a Classic, best appreciated on a big screen with no commercials.

[Kirkwood]

I didn’t find any of it boring. I found it fascinating. You have to read the book though to understand the final scenes in order to realize it is a film about God. Some people understood it, but many left the theater wondering what happened.