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Mal Gormley Spot-on review, Jack. I couldn't have said it better.
  • 6 years ago
Magdalena (Maggie) Nightingale I'm glad this is better than the movie. While it was pretty deep and had a good plotline, there was something about the movie that just bored me to tears, confused me, and made me want to press the fast-forward' button all at the same time.
  • 5 years ago
David Dibble The tandem (film and book) are counter-points, each expressing the same ideas in different ways. The film is more puzzling and less didactic--more open-ended. It also (still) wonderfully captures the wonder of near-earth space travel that utterly escapes us today. And the soundtrack adds a majestic dimension lacking in the book. The book is quite good, but the film is a visual masterpiece (if not to everyone's liking).

An interesting question is, is it better to first read, then watch, or the other way around?
  • 4 years ago
Jack Beltane @David: Experience the book or movie first? Hard to say. They're quite different. I think the movie may disappoint you if you read the book first. Having said that, the movie is a masterpiece of visual media, and the intent may be more the visuals than the plot... So yeah, I'm no help.
  • 4 years ago
Efehan Elbi Seriously, this is perfectly phrased. I'm going to use your empty container analogy when comparing the two versions of the story, now, as it is exactly right.
  • 4 years ago
Gino I think you missed the impact of the novel and film being done in tandem. At some points, one or the other had to react to what the other was doing and unfortunately, the book suffers from that. BTW, the two stories didn't split along two different paths. One is a written work. The other is an A/V experience. They have different foci and, again, the written work suffers from NOT having split more from the A/V experience. 4 pages of prose to explain going through the star gate. Really?
  • 4 years ago
Jack Beltane I don't think you understand books...
  • 3 years ago
Gino I know you don't understand film and I know you don't know much about science fiction.
  • 3 years ago
Jim I'm glad to hear that someone (Clarke?) gave some background about the Clarke/Kubrick/collaboration (say that three times fast).

I don't think that was the case when 2001 came out in pocketpaper - but then that was forty years ago.

Despite the stated collaboration, I have always regarded the novel to be one interpretation of the film. The film was quite oblique. It demands much inference of the viewer - if he will decide to do so. Without filling in the gaps, what is left is the container you describe. Kubrick expected more of you.

My forty year recollection is of a straight-forward hard-science novel (God need not apply). I may have to pick it up and re-read.
  • 3 years ago
Ryan Hibbett I disagree with much you said about the film. Of course Clarke had a different vision than Kubrick, but that doesn't make Kubrick's a hollow shell. It's more subtle than Clarke's. After hearing Douglas Trumbull speak about the film, I felt like I had a better understanding of Kubrick's version. He wanted to show that these aliens communicated with us and had us evolve, but unfortunately the way people evolve is through destruction of ourselves, and the only way to save us was to create a separate evolution of man (which ends up being the space child, our savior). It's a technically brilliant film, but also deals with plot subtleties unlike any other. Clarke's novel felt rooted in science, whereas Kubrick's was more interested in philosophy of humanity. Don't get me wrong, Clarke does it too, but it doesn't feel like that was his first priority.
  • 3 years ago
Bret Quinn The film was based on Clarke's short story, "The Sentinel," which I've read and studied. I'm a film grad student and a huge Clarke fan, and also a huge Kubrick fan. SK touched on much more than alluded to, here. HAL's internal conflict, the visual spectacle of the monolith appearances, and the final shot of the evolved Bowman are all Kubrick's vision. Clarke writes in a literal medium, which is by nature more cerebral than film. He is probably my favorite scifi writer, but that qualification aside, Clarke's novel is still beautifully and lyrically written, and was published (IMHO) to try and answer everyone who was scratching their heads after the film was released. Clarke's anti-war theme is obvious in both mediums, and that's the universal message he wants us to "get."
  • 3 years ago
Nupur Krishna Having read the book first, The movie did disappoint me. No movie can do justice to the power of human imagination
  • 2 years ago
Martin Lacasse However, it is pretty hard to translate the ideas from 2001 into a movie.
  • one year ago
Barry Your review is perfect, I agree with everything you said. The movie just wasn't as haunting and inspiring as the book to me. I wasn't left pondering my spot in the universe, like after reading the book, instead after the movie I was left pondering why I had fallen asleep three times during the final half hour and was not yet in bed
  • one year ago
Sebastian Barrymore Great review Jack. I didn't understand the film when I was a kid and was left with a feeling of awe and confusion. I'm so glad I read the book which gave the film the context it needed when I recently watched it again. Probably one of the best sci fi books I've read. I just couldn't put it down.
  • 7 months ago
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