50th anniversary of "Space Odyssey"

[Fake Messiah]

So "Space Odyssey" is back in the cinemas but is it worth the "hype"? I mean is there anything left to be said about this movie? Was this topic really necessary? Maybe a line in the chat box or even less. These older movies had this sense of an achievement when they were made, like a little wonder of the world was made, unlike today.

Maybe Tom Hanks can finally do the sequels to it that he apparently wanted to make, maybe just for the TV. One of my favorite stories around this movie is that Hanks is a big fan and his wife gave secretly Arthur Clarke some copy of the script to sign it for Tom's birthday and Clarke didn't know what to write and actually wanted to write "Tom, it's all in vain" as a joke.

In any case if you didn't see it you better do it in the way Stanley Kubrick wanted you to see it:

[Gawdzilla Sama]

B
O
R
I
N
G
!

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

B
O
R
I
N
G
!

Agreed.  Overblown, self-conscious, pretentious two and a half hours of muck.

Boru

[vulcanlogician]

I always wondered if the book was any better.

And what was up with the ending?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I always wondered if the book was any better.

And what was up with the ending?

Read the book, it was an okay space story expanded from a short story. 

The ending is the Monolith Makers rebuilding a human into the next stage of humanity. They let him live out his life before "restarting" him with all kinds of extras. The Space Child thing was dropped in the next books.

[pocaracas]

Space is huge.
Space is silent.
Everything takes forever to happen.

Can I say I liked the movie, even though they didn't travel to the planet in the book?

[Rev. Rye]

I always wondered if the book was any better.

And what was up with the ending?

I strongly suspect people might not get as much out of the film if they didn't see it in a 70mm print or aren't already huge Kubrick nerds (which I am; my favourite film is his follow-up). Honestly, I think this is one of his weaker works.

For the record, the book explains why HAL went haywire: he was told to keep the purpose of the mission a secret from the crew, but also was told to not keep secrets. Therefore, he assumes that the communication module is malfunctioning. When diagnoistics are run and the module seems to be fine, he attributes it to human error (which is technically true; the people did not program it properly). When Dave and Frank discuss deactivating HAL, he tries to kill the crew out of self-preservation. This is probably really fucking hard to put into film, so Kubrick left out HAL's inner turmoil (which seems to be why, as soon as HAL stops speaking, a voice announces why the mission is happening).

The thing is, the ending is incomprehensible because Kubrick and Clarke made a point of refusing to fall back on typical depictions of aliens, so they decided to not show them, since they would probably not even deign to speak to us, even to explain what the fuck they're even doing. Apparently, they don't even have physical forms. In the end, space is an immense and hostile place and we humans are insignificant. Imagine what the city of Chicago would be like to a worker ant. That's what the universe is to us humans, and that's really the point of the whole film.

[Succubus]

I always wondered if the book was any better.

And what was up with the ending?

It was.

It didn't end up on the cutting room floor.

[Minimalist]

The ending is the Monolith Makers rebuilding a human into the next stage of humanity.

Fuck.  I just had a horrible thought.

[The Valkyrie]

There is one movie I have ever walked out of at the cinema.

This one was it.