2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - Commentary WATCH ALONG!!
Added 2025-12-28 10:01:01 +0000 UTCWhat a freakin' MIND TRIP!!
Reaction Highlights: https://youtu.be/FJGmjyHtHYI
Watch Along: https://youtu.be/saACS19SjjI
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Comments
heard the edibles comment so I took one, got chill, and man this was awesome
Mill
2026-01-01 13:10:43 +0000 UTCThis is overly harsh. They correctly identified most of the basic themes of the movie. There's no one interpretation of the movie, and this is in fact intentional according to Kubrick: "You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film—and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level—but I don't want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he's missed the point." They even caught some of the religious themes of the movie, as Kubrick was providing a possible scientific explanation of "God" in a sense: "I will say that the God concept is at the heart of 2001 but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God. I don't believe in any of Earth's monotheistic religions, but I do believe that one can construct an intriguing scientific definition of God, once you accept the fact that there are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, that each star is a life-giving sun and that there are approximately 100 billion galaxies in just the visible universe." Kubrick famously didn't like to talk about the meaning of the work. But he did talk about wanting the movie to evoke emotion: "The very nature of the visual experience in 2001 is to give the viewer an instantaneous, visceral reaction that does not—and should not—require further amplification." Yet even some of his words, like the following regarding the poor reception of the movie among some people, make me view the work as *even more* pretentious, lmao: "Perhaps there is a certain element of the lumpen literati that is so dogmatically atheist and materialist and Earth-bound that it finds the grandeur of space and the myriad mysteries of cosmic intelligence anathema." Like seriously, don't be an artist and claim that people don't like your work because they're too stupid to understand the grandeur of space. That's pretentious as hell. Anyways, the movie had two different writers that disagreed with each other, which is probably why the movie is so ambiguous - they had to satisfy both writers, which results in some in-between story of the two. Personally, even if the movie evokes wonder very well, this is what makes the movie kind of a disaster story-wise. And I'm certainly allowed to have that opinion, and I cite both the antagonistic relationship between the two writers and the incessant theorizing about what the movie is about as reasons why the movie actually *failed* to provide real philosophical meaning to people beyond wonder and filmaking technique. The movie becomes what you want it to be, which is not a very useful thing for this type of movie, and clearly went against what Clarke was trying to do, *especially* since the whole thing is based on Clarke's short story The Sentinel.
Christian Seibold
2025-12-29 15:00:24 +0000 UTCI mean this was an epic example of …maybe it’s time to try commentary with anyone that has knowledge or info about the movie…bc this was next level talking nonsense.
Victoria Bert
2025-12-29 08:31:12 +0000 UTCI highly recommend you guys check out Disney's The Black Hole!! It's imo an incredibly underrated early sci fi film from the late 70s. It's the same mold as this one kind of.
FlyingScotsman4072
2025-12-29 06:36:24 +0000 UTC
