This film brought to you courtesy of Arthur Clarke

Rating: Null/10 (22 August 2009)

I think that because Stanley Kubrick directed this film people think that he wrote the SF story called The Sentinel, which led to a book, which led to this film. The Sentinal short SF story and the subsequent SF book 2001 A Space Odyssey was written of course by British SF pioneer Sir Arthur Clarke. The writer, Arthur Clarke was asked by his publisher to expand on his short story called The Sentinal which led to the creation of the book 2001 A Space Odyssey, which led to interest in creating a film version of the book. Sadly, both writer and director are now dead. This film did not age very well, I think. Never mind that the entire conceptualization has mankind making a trip to Jupiter in 2001 and in real life we are not even close to making such an expedition. That is a bit of a thing. Anyway, I think that without the original SF by Arthur Clarke this film would not even exist on paper. Maybe I am underscoring the efforts of the film maker, but since the entire story is the result of Arthur Clarke, I question the superiority of the director position in this project. The director is doing a job here, not the writer is doing a job for the director. The now famous 'psychedelic journey' in this film represents the futurism of Arthur Clarke, but it also associates the film with some kind of drug induced hallucination, which is not what the writer intended. The film is supposed to talk about how man comes into contact with a superior alien race. What that means is anybodies guess. The writer says it is the birth of man in a state of cosmic awareness in a new form. I think that is maybe a bit ambiguous.It is OK to question great works of SF, and Arthur Clarke was one of the best SF writers that ever lived.(by the way anybody can slip in zero G-its your muscle co-ordination thats the issue-not you falling down-and the character in question in the film has Velcro on the souls of her shoes which sticks to other fabric surfaces)