Comment by CamperBob2

The first time someone encounters 2001, they will almost certainly come away with some WTF? vibes, at least if they're being honest with themselves.

For my first time, I made the mistake of renting a VHS and watching it on a 19" TV. Heard this was a good SF movie, guess I'll check it off my list. Yeah, no. What I saw later in a 70mm cinema was the same content, same story, same words and images, but a very different movie. The setting and presentation made all the difference between a seemingly-pointless waste of time and a profound life experience.

That said, what we saw isn't what Kubrick filmed. Bowman's exercise sequence was originally a full 10 minutes long, just pacing around in circles, and a few other sequences including the Dawn of Man prologue were also much longer. Audiences in 1968 weren't buying it. Kubrick had to tighten things up, because complaining about the audience's attention span wasn't the option back then that it apparently is now.