If 2001 a space odyssey has no haters I’m dead. I look at it through an artistic lens and still 30% of scenes have no purpose and 100% of scenes are minutes longer than they need to be with absolutely nothing of any substance happening
I admit that a lot of my memory of the film is lacking now, which I would claim to be caused by the problems that I said but I realise it doesn’t really put me in a position to give a lot of weight behind my arguments. Despite that, I really don’t understand the purpose of almost all of Heywood Floyd’s scenes. I can’t think of anything that section of the movie accomplishes to move the plot along or communicates about themes of the film that couldn’t be easily done in a tenth of the screentime. If you have a reason that those scenes exist then I’m genuinely interested in hearing about it
I've literally never considered it until now, but the very obvious answer is that Heywood Floyd is the mechanism by which the state of the world is revealed.
Good stories show instead of telling. So following Floyd is a frankly beautiful and simple way of revealing not just the conflict, not just the discovery of the alien artifact, but also of revealing the universe of the film, and mans place within it.
I think you might be just locked out of enjoying it because you are looking at this from a modern, plot driven point of view. This is not a quick-cut action blockbuster.
This is a movie where that quietness and stillness, the slow grandeur of the camera movements, the classical score, all of that is sort of a stand-in for the the grand eternal emptiness of space itself.
The classical music contrasts with the stark modernist minimalism, and Heywood Floyd does the same. He's just a man doing almost mundane work in a world that is so advanced it's almost unrecognizable. But people still take flights. They eat, they have meetings, they drop pens, you know? We accept the world because he inhabits the world so earnestly.
Heywood provides human scale, acts as a standin for the audience experiencing these mysteries. The audience accepts a moon base and a space voyage and an ineffable alien artifact because of the sheer solid mundanity of Heywood.
This movie is an experience if watched on the big screen. It's actually unnerving looking at the red eye of HAL starring back at you from a massive screen.
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u/orangesfwr 8h ago
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