Read the book instead...

Rating: 5/10 (27 March 2000)

2001: A Space Odyssey is probably my favourite book of all time and after having read it, I lapped up all of Clarke's sequels...but unfortunately this movie did not cut it for me...I really tried to like it but I just couldn't - maybe my brain has been numbed by all the usual fast paced sci-fi fare these days, but I just found the film really tedious in parts...the ape section and the various "silence" sequences were irrelevant and boring and did not add to the story in any way.
I admit that some of the ideas on view are marvellous and visionary, such as the rotating space station, but again that's due more to Clarke's scientific brilliance rather than to Kubrick - quite why Kubrick would want to have a ten minute sequence of a space station spinning in space to classical music is beyond me (except for the possibility that a spinning space station was a strikingly new concept back then and he wanted to emphasise the point?).
I sometimes wonder if I would have enjoyed the movie more if I hadn't read the book first - it was such a well told and coherent story, which contrasts greatly to the movie which is very abstract. Maybe anyone thinking of watching this movie should see it before they read the book, but definitely read the book - it's a true masterpiece....