I finally watched 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time last night, thanks to my friend, and I'll give it this: it's interesting. If I had read the novel (written concurrently with the film), I would have better understood what was going on, and why the men in the monkey suits were screeching at this black rectangle thingy. I knew vaguely about the Star Child, thanks to the back of 2010, which for some reason my parents acquired at some point, and I knew about Dave and his good buddy, HAL 9000, but a lot of it looked like Kubrick was having fun with acid.
We have lots of looooong, slow shots of spaceships and floating astronauts (and that scene in Spaceballs suddenly makes more sense...). We have the trippy light show at the end of the film. We have the Chorus From Hell. We have Dave turning into a fetal sort of being.
Huh.
The sequels are trippier. Clarke wasn't a big stickler for continuity in his novels; he claimed instead that each was in a separate universe or some such. As a result, we have monoliths and lifeforms on Europa, Jupiter turning into a short-lived star, HAL being awakened and turning into another Star Child to be Dave's companion, that guy from the start of the movie whose kid wanted a bushbaby being split into human and Star Child, HAL and Dave merging into Halman to save Earth...
My friend insists I should read Foundation. Asimov liked robots, granted, but he seemed to be off the drugs.
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