Cons: Too much product placement at the spaceport, the ending
The Bottom Line: 2002: A SPACE ODYSSEY has too much product placement even for a modern movie, and the ending is disappointing for readers of the book.
2002: A SPACE ODYSSEY in no way lives up to the potential Arthur C. Clarke set for it in the book of the same name.
For those unfamiliar with the plot, it starts out on prehistoric Earth. A group of apelike precursors of homo sapiens, going about their lives in a very peacable fashion given the circumstances, finds what is called an obelisk in the book. Being that they are more primitive than we are, they have no idea what this thing is, nor do they know its true purpose.
Fast forward to 2001. We find ourselves meeting Heywood Floyd, a scientist charged with investigating a similar obelisk on the moon. He is shipped to a space station as a part of his trip to the moon to investigate this obelisk.
We now go to the astronauts involved in this tale. (I will not reveal their location, because I don't want to give away the entire plot for sci-fi buffs out there, but suffice it to say that they are in orbit around a planet.) We meet up with the astronauts charged with the care and feeding of this space station. This is the point at which things start to get really bizarre, as their computer, Hal, starts to malfunction, big time. To say any more about the plot is to commit the cardinal sin of the reviewer, giving away the ending.
There are two parts to this movie that qualify as "the worst" parts. The first is the sequence in which Heywood Floyd is at the space station. For anyone familiar with the modern funding technique called product placement, it will be recognizable almost immediately, in the scenes with Hilton and telephone-company advertising in the background of the space station. In fact, for a movie so widely considered a classic of the sci-fi genre, the amount of product placement is absolutely offensive. In no other classic movie made before this does one find so much advertising; in fact, it was considered customary, even at the time 2001 was made, to invent products specifically for the movie or book. (This is done in the LEFT BEHIND series, even today; Rayford Steele works for Pan-Continental as an airline pilot, and Buck Williams starts out by working for a tabloid called Global Weekly.) Although ET is commonly considered the first use of this advertising technique, it is merely the first that modern moviegoers remember; try looking at this sequence in 2001 for the real first use of product placement. (I'm sure Hilton and AT&T paid big bucks to get the right to have their names so prominently displayed.)
Secondly, there is the ending to consider. Although I give Douglas Trumbull (the equivalent of ILM in his day) a lot of credit for the work he put in on this ending, and I won't reveal specifics about it, it just doesn't measure up to Clarke's version as written in the book. Clarke was a smart author; he left the specifics up to the imagination of the reader, a trait I wish the makers of 2001 would have learned to imitate. (I will say, without giving away the specifics, that Clarke, skeptic that he was, gave me a foretaste of the hereafter when he wrote the ending of the novel upon which this movie is based. From the movie, I got more of a "let's evolve out of this mess" feel, a philosophy with which I disagree strongly.)
If you're bound and determined to see all the sci-fi classic films of the 20th century, go ahead and get this off Netflix or something. Otherwise, skip it.
A four-million-year-old black monolith is discovered on the moon and the government while hiding the situation from the public sends a team of scienti...More at Family Video
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