Chance_Boudreaux19 Review of 2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

The special effects are better than CGI in most movies today

[7/10 · 7 April 2016]

I neither love nor hate this movie which is rare, most people seem to have pretty strong feelings towards it either way. The best thing about this movie is that it looks fantastic, the special effects look better than most movies today which again proves that practical effects will always be better than CGI which can look fake at time. A lot of work went into those effects and I can appreciate them and think about how they made it all look so real in the 60s. Where the movie falters is the plot because what is the plot of this movie? The characters have almost no personality and are just tools in the movie, the best character and the only one which has an arc is of course HAL-9000 which is an AI. HAL is menacing and creepy and all the scenes with him were great. I wish the movie followed Dr Floyd and had him go to Jupiter and beyond because his personality was being established and he could have been more developed, instead we get two astronauts who we are supposed to care about but we don't because we just met them and don't know much about them. Furthermore the music is great but really the ritualistic sounds that start playing when the monolith appears would have made any scene creepy, I could have filmed myself looking in the mirror and put that music over the video and it would have been creepy. The space travel scene scared me more than many horror scenes probably because of the subliminal messages combined with the music, Stanley Kubrick is a master of creating creepy scenes that scare me even though they are technically not scary, the way he combines music and visuals to create atmosphere is perfect. All in all the movie is a special effects showcase and the effects do look great but that is not enough for this movie to be one of my favorites. People complain about the Transformers movies being just a showcase of special effects but this movie is exactly that. Now I am not saying the Transformers movies are better because they are not, they are so visually loud they are bound to give anyone a headache but I am just saying that both Transfomers and 2001 are made to showcase special effects and of course 2001 does it much better. It is however a dish that looks like the best thing in the world but the taste doesn't live up to it. Still I enjoyed it despite being bored in a few sections of ships docking and other things and I kind of dig the weird ending, it is definitely a movie I can appreciate on many levels but I just think it could have been so much more.