I feel like you have to go in knowing it's extremely slow and methodical, it really gives room to breath and take in the sights and such. Idk it's a very interestingly shot movie and I wish more were like it, seems like people's attention spans aren't long enough though.

Both of those movies are on my watchlist. My family saw 2001 A Space Odyssey and they HATED it.

We’d had Star Trek for two years by that point. It really was not that groundbreaking.

Star Wars came out 9 years after 2001 (edit: and the original series Star Trek doesn’t have near the realism of 2001). The visuals absolutely were groundbreaking -- they still hold up, and look better than all but a handful of space movies that came out before about the 90s.

Your point with the pacing is fair, but I think about half that is an artifact of the time or a byproduct of watching it on a couch with a smartphone instead of in a theater.

exactly how i feel about it too. the 5 minute long segment that was just nature footage with weird visual filters was also particularly hard to watch.

i also found the whole obelisk thing super repetitive. i was hoping that they would go into more detail about the obelisks, and explore the topic more. but it ended up feeling like they were asking the question “what’s a list of weird times and places where we could put an obelisk”, and that was the extent of it.