Ted’s review published on Letterboxd:
“I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.”
I finally got round to watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it did not disappoint. Many call it a masterpiece, but I’ve also seen quite a few people call it pretentious and whilst I can see why they think that, I thoroughly disagree.
The film has a very grand plot that starts with the dawn of humanity, then jumps forward to astronauts finding an obelisk on the moon, but then the obelisk moves so a new group of astronauts being sent on a mission to one of Jupiter’s moons to find it.
The first thing I’ll say about this film was the visual side. Man alive, this was WAY ahead of it’s time! All the spaceships looked amazingly realistic and absolutely blew me away. The interior of the spaceship looked breathtaking; the hamster wheel look was really creative and added to the films futuristic feel a lot.
The cinematography was excellent and provided so many iconic shots, my favourite being Dave walking through the spaceship. All of them were so eye catching and very impressive
The writing was great. The whole plot is very slow yet felt very fast moving due to how immersive it was. The majority of the film had little to no dialogue and was mostly shots of space and planets, but when an actual scene happened then it was really good. My favourite scene was when HAL sang ‘Daisy, Daisy…’ because of how haunting it was, listening to the pitch drop line by line. Excellently written and executed.
Dave felt slightly underwritten but that didn’t matter a whole lot as I could see that building on Dave’s character wasn’t crucial or even necessary overall. He was acted well by Keir Dullea, but lacked emotion in his performance. He was still enjoyable to watch.
HAL was the highlight of the film. He was so creepy, with his sinister-looking red eye constantly staring, motionless. His monotone voice gave dehumanised him, making him feel even more of a threat. I loved his character so much.
Also, before I conclude the review, why don’t we have colourful space suits? All the spacesuits in this film were nice looking and each had different colours. Why hasn’t NASA taken that onboard? It’s ridiculous.
2001: A Space Odyssey is a timeless classic and everything I have said has definitely been said decades before I said it, but man is this a great movie.
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