2001: My book review (aged 14 or 15)
The film 2001: A Space Odyssey came out in 1968. I was 7 and despite my temper tantrum, I wasn’t taken to see it. Nah, that didn’t happen.
I think it was in 1975 (Form 3/Year 9) that the school sent our parents a letter about an upcoming excursion – to the Trak Cinema to see 2001. I’d never heard of it, but someone said it was about a spaceship going to Jupiter. Mmm, that could be interesting.
It was the 70mm version on a big screen and with 6-track surround sound. It was like nothing I’d seen before, or since. To say it impressed and influenced me is to not understand the word understatement. I was 13 or 14.
But this is not about the film. This is about two pieces of foolscap paper I found a few days ago. It was from Form 4/Year 10 (1976) and was my hand-written book review of 2001.
I’m pretty sure we saw the film in ’75, but it may have been ’76. There’s no date on the book review and I turned 15 in late May ’76, so I could have even been 14 when I wrote this.
Using my high tech scanning rig, I photographed the 4 sides, edited and shrunk them in Photoshop and then merged into a PDF.
Here is the link to the PDF version of the scanned pages on Dropbox.
Decades on, it was a real buzz to read this. Particularly the teacher’s comments, thanking me (!) 🙂 Yes, I’ve forgotten their name, sorry teacher.
Seriously – you can hopefully now see why, when a year of two later the “sci fi” film Star Wars came out…I went “yeah, it’s ok, but nah”.
