2001: A Space Odyssey (film) in science fiction films was sparked by Japanese tokusatsu films such as "Warning from Space" (1956). According to his biographer John Baxter, despite their "clumsy model sequences, the films were often well-photographed in colour ... and their dismal dialogue was delivered in well-designed and well-lit sets." Searching for a collaborator in the science fiction community, Kubrick was advised by a mutual acquaintance, Columbia Pictures staffer Roger Caras, to talk to writer Arthur C. Clarke, who lived in Ceylon. Although convinced that Clarke was "a recluse, a nut who lives in a tree", Kubrick allowed Caras to cable the film proposal
2001: A Space Odyssey (film) artist.") John Simon felt it was "a regrettable failure, although not a total one. This film is fascinating when it concentrates on apes or machines ... and dreadful when it deals with the in-betweens: humans ... "2001", for all its lively visual and mechanical spectacle, is a kind of space-"Spartacus" and, more pretentious still, a shaggy God story." Eminent historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. deemed the film "morally pretentious, intellectually obscure and inordinately long ... a film out of control". In a 2001 review the BBC said that its slow pacing often alienates modern audiences more than it did upon