Review Detail

8.7 3 10
FanFix August 14, 2012 3725
(Updated: September 13, 2012)
Enjoyment
 
7.0
Review by geminigod — June 7, 2011 @ 6:50 pm

From an editing standpoint, the video looks amazing. It looks like somebody did a great job restoring the movie and that you preserved the quality in your edit well. Your cuts appeared to be technically flawless and worked fine within the context of the original story, what little story there is anyway given its abstract nature. Though to be honest and fair about ranking the technical side of this edit relative to other fanedits, it would not be comparing apples to apples to give you 10/10 for your technical work. There is virtually no audio in this entire movie other than dialogue and a few sound effects, thus making the editing a relatively simple process.

I am struggling how best to rank this because of the age of the material. Based on your stated objectives to essentially preserve the directors original vision and only to cut out the most terribly, unacceptably long portions of the movie, this edit succeeded very well. Though, you still didn’t manage to remove all of the “pretentious philosophizing” in my opinion, granted it is a very subjective matter. There was one point where I felt like the director was cramming the moral message of the movie down my throat when the character goes off on a long monologue that I shall briefly paraphrase, “why are we exploring the stars when we should be exploring inward into our own minds and hearts instead.” Maybe the message struck me particularly bad because of my own present-day biases. It is a political soft spot for me when people try to discredit or dismiss what little is left of America’s space program.

Based only on your intentions, I would probably give you ~9/10 as the previous reviewers did, but I just can’t do that. I’m sorry. For me this story still doesn’t work either on an abstract level or a narrative level. It is still beyond terrible in its pacing relative to movies being made then and today (and this is coming from a guy who will happily sit through the original 2001). I would love to see an alternate, more ambitious version of this movie that tries to bring it more inline with modern movie expectations by cutting another unnecessary 30+ minutes out of it, adding music, and reworking the story a bit.

7/10
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