Is Good but Dull, Dull...DULL!

Rating: Null/10 (23 September 2000)

Boys you guys really hit this one on the head, both sides.
It is Very well made, the F/X are still effective as hell, yeah Kubrick is tossing out Big Cosmic Questions galore here, yeah Clarke throws in the Vast Universe is Our Pal theme in here pretty big time too.
Having first seen this in '76 as an 11 year old on TV and a few years lator in the theatre, I got both doses of how it was meant to be seen. It is impressive.
But it moves like lead in an ice storm. It is just So bloody slow. You want there to be Tie fighters racing by the space Stations or a Death Star or even the Swinetrek from Pigs in Space to be out there amidst the floating Dominos, jupiter and Io.
Instead you get tons of Wagner tunes, Jupiter bearing down over the ship, a reaallll slow trip to Jupiter's environs, a sneaky computer, a few guys in bad apes soots at the start...that weird Finding the Big Domino in the Moon's crater scene...oh yeah, there's a lot to this all.
But-where does it all take you, the coldness of space, of technology, of the future and the Universe? Into some warped Acid drenched trip into hyper space, where you get a big kid floating in a bubble heading back Earthwards at the end....
Okay, that's cute guys-now does it mean anything?
Maybe its like those Dali flat clock paintings, you get outta them what you put into them...but what I saw just made my eyes glaze over; and I think it's a flick that coulda used some Judicious EDITING(read:SHORTENING) ere it was released.
So-it is a classic yeah. And I recommend it to anyone wanting an outta body experience. Just expect to wade through a snoozer of a space trip ere the whacked ending first.
***1/2 stars, believe it or not, I truly do admire the effort, though it's about as much fun to sit through as a Ben Stein Clone convention....