Kubrick: 2001: A Space Odyssey part 3
Almost an hour into 2001, the movie starts. We meet the narrative’s third human-or-thereabouts protagonist, Dave Bowman (although Bowman’s protagonist status doesn’t really kick in for another half-hour or so). When people complain that 2001 is slow, or draggy, I think this, not the pace of the editing or the speed of the narrative development, are what they’re talking about. We saw the same thing happen this summer with Inglourious Basterds, many viewers found the movie boring and without incident, not because it was but because it kept "starting over," introducing new protagonists an hour or more into the movie and asking us to invest in their stories. The protagonists of 2001 (the human ones, not the invisible-extraterrestrials ones) never meet one another, and Bowman, the last, only has the dimmest awareness of what the hell is going on in the very last moments of the movie, and at that point the viewer is sometimes so baffled that it’s easy to miss just what Bowman’s revelation is about.