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.

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.

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.