Thankfully, I read the book before seeing the movie.
Most of the friends I've been with who saw the film first did a good job of following the plot up until the final act, which was pretty much unfilmable at the time.
Decades later, the Jodie Foster movie, Contact, did a much better job of visualizing "a trip through an interstellar mass transit system" than 2001 showing a trippy light show.
The third act is pretty much Jaws after the breakdown of the animatronic shark. There are actual pre-production stills showing aliens [1], but this was found unsatisfactory and the film drifted towards a much more abstract direction. Probably, it's the much better film, because of this. (Personally, I can't think of any solution showing the events in real life that isn't cheesy or even kitschy. It may have been The Abyss of 1960s cinema. As-is, the notion that the first two realistic acts of the film are driving towards an enigmatic, kind of open end, was certainly important for its reception and its long-term relevance.)
[1] Compare https://touringinstability.wordpress.com/2013/10/18/the-alie...
What is wrong with The Abyss? The theatrical release was fine. The extended addition with the 5 minute video montage of the aliens preaching to Bud that humans are destructive seemed like the only bad thing to me but that wasn't in the theatrical release.
Hum, the ending had to be remade after first screenings, and even as-is, it's subject to critique by many, diminishing the value of the entire film. (I recall it even being laughed at. I guess, audiences may have become more tolerant, since.) It may have done better with a more abstract solution, as well.
(There may be specific topics where "show, don't tell" becomes "experience, don't show". And 2001 tried to accomplish this. The Abyss, on the other hand, tried still to show, probably failing in its mission. — There was a time when German media theory, in the wake of F.A. Kittler, was kind of obsessed with the written signifier of the novel giving rise to an immediate, visually representative significant. Observed from this perspective, even Clarke's novel takes a step back into abstraction: we may find it hard to invoke an immediate imaginary representation, while reading, the narrative pretty much falls back to us being told, instead of giving rise to imagination, much until the last, much more "tangible" gesture of the Space Child. But, even then, the perspective of the Space Child, cynical without cynicism, and what may come of this, is very much an open ending. So, why not move this openness forward in the plot?)
The book makes a lot of things clearer than the film.
Interestingly the book and the film were developed together by Kubrick and Clarke as a collaborative process.
Usually the book comes before the film, but occasionally it comes after.
I can't think of other examples where the novel was developed alongside the film but I expect there are!
The Third Man is another example. Graham Greene wrote a treatment before he wrote the screenplay. The treatment, which wasn't written with publication in mind, was later published as a novella, and it differs from the film in several notable ways, because Greene and the directors changed things during the writing of the screenplay and the principal making of the film.
> I can't think of other examples where the novel was developed alongside the film but I expect there are!
Game of Thrones?
That was a television series that should've waited. They needed the books to be finished.
Because it's either:
A) regular Hollywood schlock that ruined the last seasons; or (worse)
B) that was his actual direction for the book series and now he knows that it's not good.
Either way, I believe we will never get the final books in that series due to the television series.
I definitely agree the show influenced the books. Not sure that’s better or worse. I didn’t hate the ending as much as everyone else. It made sense. Maybe it would be more palatable with a subsequent series.
Counterpoint - the books will never be finished, so waiting would make no sense.
However, they should hire writers that can actually write characters and plots other then simplest ones. The writing quality was indeed horrible by the end.
And interestingly Clarke set the destination as Saturn, whereas Kubrick made it Jupiter. In the sequel book, 2010, Clarke used Jupiter as in the movie.
Note though that the movie is not an adaption of the novel. They were written in tandem, and the movie was published slightly before the book.
I thought the movie Contact was very different from the book, and the ending was different -- no?
Both movies had a sequence that was supposed to represent a human being traveling through the equivalent of an intergalactic mass transit system to a distant location.
At the time that 2001 was made, effects were not there yet.