| I've watched 2001 twice in my life. Once on my laptop screen, and once in a theater. Wildly different experiences. On a laptop, it was maddeningly slow. I couldn't bear that scene where the spaceship docks on the space station while the Blue Danube Waltz played. Excruciating. I wish there was more explanation, as my mind was wandering watching this dull film. In a theater, I experienced a completely different film.On the big screen, I could imagine the scale of this achievement, of a man-made spaceship landing on a man-made space station, all this coordination, against the Blue Danube waltz, and it was all I could see in my field of vision. Not distracted by other things as I was on my laptop. I didn't need explanation. I just felt it. I finally felt that I had "gotten" the movie. It was an experience. Not just plot and explosions and super heroes, like most movies are today. A powerful film is expressed in images! Film. It's called a motion picture. The more a film can be expressed in images, the more "pure" it is to its medium! And most of the film was silent. I'm glad Clarke got the chance to make it a novel, and told it in the form most fitting for him. Kubrick was a filmmaker and Clarke a writer. I think it is natural that they would disagree on the telling of this story. Different mediums call for different ways to tell the story. |
One of my favorite old movies is "The Stunt Man". One of my most disappointing viewing experiences was re-watching "The Stunt Man" on a friends small screen. Most of the emotional and dramatic tension in the film is driven by the sense/fear that the Peter O'Toole character is omniscient, that no matter what the other characters try he will somehow be ahead of them. This works because the viewer also ends up believing this. But a lot of the work to sell this is done in the viewers peripheral vision and on a small screen it simply doesn't happen which leaves the film sadly deflated.