2001: A Colossal Waste of Time

I remember as a kid that my parents once showed me and my siblings the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was young at the time (somewhere in my low teens) and all I could remember about the movie is it was extremely long and boring. And there were monkeys in it. Plus a talking computer that got disconnected. But other than that, it was long and boring. And also long. Plus boring.

Anyway, this weekend I saw that they had the special edition of the movie on sale for $10, and since it’d been so long since I’d watched it and since I’d grown a lot since I’d watched it, I figured I’d pick it up and watch it again and see how I feel about it now. So I figured I’d review it here.

First of all, the movie is long and boring. There’s also some monkeys in it, a talking computer that gets disconnected, and it’s really long. Plus boring.

Other than that the movie was…well, underwhelming isn’t weak enough.

Frankly, I can’t see why people make such a big deal about this movie. The plot is completely stupid, and I guarantee that no one knows what the movie is about.

How do I know this? Ask ten people and they’ll give you two hundred answers about what the movie is about. My favorite Camille Paglia, a feminist whacko, who concludes that when Dave turns off HAL 9000, it’s really a depiction of a sociopathic man raping a woman. Yes, you heard that right. When a man acts to turn off a computer that has killed everyone else on the ship, that is the same as rape (and I thought Public Transit was fiction.)

Don’t believe me? Check out the video here. At the 5:55 mark is when Paglia goes off on the Dave = rapist point.

By the way, I’m pretty sure Paglia has a psychosis. But that’s neither here nor there.

The end result after having seen 2001 a second time at a much older age is…

This movie sucks.

UPDATE: After talking to a co-worker, I’ve concluded that if Dave’s killing of HAL 9000 constitutes a metaphor for rape, then the rest of the movie is a metaphor showing that if you leave a woman unsupervised for five minutes she’ll kill everyone on board the ship…