Why is "2001: A Space Odyssey" considered such a good movie?

[Aedilred]

Private Ryan is the best of Spielberg's late/middle period by some distance, but I think it's robbed of the status it should have enjoyed by the infamously sappy epilogue (and prologue, for that matter). There are other issues with Private Ryan too: the archetypal characterisations of the squad soldiers, the artificial dialogue, and so on, but that's the big one. In a way it's typical of where Spielberg went off the tracks a little: he loses the ruthlessness and discipline to cut the film to remove the elements that inhibit its greatness. It's a tendency that becomes more pronounced over time with his films almost from that point on (it's not quite the bridging film, since the inexplicable JP2 predates it).

[hustlertwo]

Inexplicable is a good word for JP2. It feels so much like a cheap cash-in I constantly forget it is actually from the same director, who with the first delivered one of the purest summer blockbuster experiences in cinematic history to date.

[Gnoman]

That is simply because it is a cheap cash-in. The first Jurassic Park was based on an already successful novel that was intended to be entirely self-contained. The author was heavily pressured by both fans of the book and Spielburg (who wanted material for a second movie) to write the only sequel in Crichton's entire literary output. The quality of the book suffered badly from the fact that Crichton really didn't know how to write a sequel (hence the blatant reuse of several concepts from the first instead of something more ambitious), and the movie made it worse by the way it hacked at the already weak plot as opposed to the careful pruning needed for the more solid original.