The Greatest Movie Of All Time. Period.

Rating: 10/10 (2 November 2005)

I was lucky enough to be first shown this masterpiece of cinema in my mid-teenage years, thus having a relatively broad mind, and the capacity to extend the limits of thought to understand the message that 2001: A Space Odyssey is telling us. First of all allow me to alleviate the common rumor or nowadays stereotype that this movie is boring. One simple unalienable fact that people must realize is that the differences contrasting between past and modern cinema are unlimited and infinite. The ever-present mood, emphasis and feeling that the 60s and 70s brought into movies is irreplaceable. In those days, if a movie was 2 1/2 hours long, the mindset of movie-goers wasn't "Oh, this movie must be so packed full of action that the 2 hours will shoot by like lightning." They were more along the lines of "Okay, this movie is long, it is an epic, what needs to be said to us cannot be simply accomplished within minutes, things have to happen before grander things can happen, an we are going to be shown virtually every second of it." The one thing people tend to forget about space and space travel and space technology is that it ISN'T fast. It cannot just happen as if it were on a timer as in the movie atrocity Armageddon. What happens happens at the pace it does to perpetuate the un-deniable fact that this movie, although a work of science fiction, is as realistic as it can be, regardless if it's about the possible futures that lay before us. These days, the audiences have been dumbed down by so-called logic in movies. It must all be explained to them, otherwise they leave confused and angry. Those who honestly dislike 2001 simply do not, or no longer possess the patience, nor the capacity to understand that some truths will NOT be merely dropped into our laps. What makes a fantastic film, the sole characteristic that classifies a movie as brilliant, is the fact that it leaves US to create OUR OWN meanings for why something in a movie is happening. The inner-depths to 2001's meanings range from knowledge of the universe around us, to the inconsistency of evolving technology. The rest is up to us to decipher, after we do that, we can believe what WE think is the true meaning.