A Magnificent Epic That's Terribly Misunderstood

Rating: 10/10 (29 May 2002)

Okay, I've read enough viewer comments and can't contain myself. I'm a writer and a filmmaker. I'd like to know where it is written that a film has to explain itself to you. I saw 2001 when it first opened. I was with five other people. We discussed the film for two hours. When was the last time that happened? For those of you who felt it was slow, so is space travel. Get it! There ain't no Warp Factor 1. Secondly, the ending: has nobody ever read anything by Arthur C. Clarke? One of the recurring themes in Clarke's work is that any civilization sufficiently advanced over humankind would seem like Magic, or even Gods. If you didn't understand the ending, perhaps you weren't supposed to. Isn't it possible that Kubrick was giving you the experience of how clueless we would all be if confronted by an intelligence millions of years ahead of us. Look, opinions are like rear ends, everybody has them, but when people put this film down as garbage or the equivalent, it tells me that they aren't thinking it through. Television and motion pictures are very passive media. They supply you with 100% of audio and video. Old time radio forced the listener to be imaginative and conjure up the picture. Surprisingly, it's not difficult to do that at all. Here is a film that dares to be somewhere between radio and the visual media. It doesn't hand you all the answers on a silver platter. Like a really good computer game you have to figure them out. Whether you liked it or not is your decision. Enough very knowledable people in the film world have viewed it and deemed it one of the great masterpieces of film. As many have said, it's an experience. If you can't deal with that, then go back to your five pages and a boink pacing, but dissing this film is a bit like saying Mozart didn't know squat about music. An opinion like that only make you look bad.