It’s a slightly click-baity title, but as we’re still generating more content for our magazines, this one included, why not?
My Sci-fi unpopular opinion is that 2001: A Space Odyssey is nothing but pretentious, LSD fueled nonsense. I’ve tried watching it multiple times and each time I have absolutely no patience for the pointless little scenes which contain little to no depth or meaningful plot, all coalescing towards that 15 minute “journey” through space and series of hallucinations or whatever that are supposed to be deep, shake you to your foundations, and make you re-think the whole human condition.
But it doesn’t. Because it’s just pretentious, LSD fueled nonsense. Planet of the Apes was released in the same year and is, on every level, a better Sci-fi movie. It offers mystery, a consistent and engaging plot, relatable characters you actually care about, and asks a lot more questions about the world and our place in it.
I agree, if you’re watching anything from the Special Editions and onward. I mentioned this over on “the old site” in a conversation, but the Special Editions and their subsequent versions absolutely destroyed the pacing of the entire movie… particularly the first one.
I recently rewatched the “4K77” version of Star Wars and was blown away… I was enthralled as I don’t remember being by Star Wars since I saw it as a kid on almost worn out VHS. The special edition additions and later modifications kill the pacing of the movie and add irrelevant details that don’t need to be on screen… a prime example would be the Jabba scene in the original. It added nothing that hadn’t already been implied in the Greedo scene and broke up the flow of the story of getting from the tavern to the Falcon… it felt unnecessary because it was.
Even a smaller detail; when the stormtroopers are examining the escape pod the scene flows brilliantly with the trooper finding the droid part… in the special and later editions it’s preceded by a longer cut that shows off the CGI dewbacks… which was unnecessary as it was always implied with the trooper on a dewback in the background (even if it was static). It also just looks awkward in every subsequent edition and results in an extended scene that removes a good “story beat” in the same way that a poor drummer hitting a bass drum at the wrong time can throw off an entire song and make it sound like a cacophony.
Star Wars as originally released was a masterpiece of editing. Everything flowed, there was a symmetry and perfect timing to the story beats. That symmetry makes the flow predictable… nothing is “shocking” in Star Wars but everything works together and literally creates a far better movie than it has any right to be. The Special Editions completely screwed that up.