I am a huge sci-fi fan. My favorite show is Doctor Who and I love and grew up watching shows about space exploration like Star Trek and Stargate but for some reason, I’ve never gotten around watching a classic like 2001: A Space Odyssey… and now I know why.

The movie was unbelievably slow, and I can’t stand slow developing movies. I was lost for the entire first half of the film and I kept thinking how space exploration was related to the first 20 minutes of the film, which consisted only of monkeys screeching… for 20 minutes. Then, when we actually saw some human characters, it’s like they weren’t even human. They barely conveyed any emotion which made it hard for them to be either relatable or likeable. Later on, I read a Rose blog that pointed out that Hal, an AI, is portrayed to have more emotions than the humans themselves, which then becomes a worrying plot point in the movie. So I guess the “terrible acting” is really a deliberate choice to make a point come across.

I will say, however, I really liked how they integrated the monolith with humankind’s evolution. And how this finally explained those awful 20 minutes at the beginning of the movie. Sadly, the movie did not wrap up all of the plot points and left some things open to interpretation, like the Star Child, something that not even the depths of Wikipedia has been able to explain to me.