Visually stunning but not as deep as it pretends

Rating: 5/10 (5 April 1999)

I bet that Stanley Kubrick spent the last thirty years of his life laughing his tuckus off that of all of his works, this one most profoundly affected the cultural consciousness which he consistently satirizes.
Evidence of this abounds: witness the instantly recognizable creations of the computer HAL, and its synthetic voice; the character "Dave" and the line "What are you doing, Dave?"; and the stylized score based on Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra."
There is no doubt that this is a beautiful, confounding picture that says something about the dehumanizing effects of technology. What *else* it says is totally unclear - the screenplay is often quite witty, but feels like it was never thought completely through. Of course, works that are incomprehensible are often deemed to be profound, and Kubrick seems to have understood that; in fact, the emergence of drug culture and middle-class spiritual yearnings during the late 60s allowed him to create something really huge and really vague, and pass it off as something really deep.
The film opens with "The Dawn of Man," where it is implied that man's evolution was directed by either a) an alien life-force, or b) a God-like creature, represented by a huge black monolith.
The former interpretation would be the less mundane, more sci-fi expression, but the relationship between man and alien is never developed. Instead, outer space is a setting - an excuse for an excursion by scientists (who discover a huge monolith on the moon), who end up battling against a computer (HAL - increment the letters by one and you get IBM) that turns on its creators.
What the monolith means, or what is is doing in outer space, is bafflingly unclear, and Kubrick never bothers to explain its presence. In spite of this (or maybe because of it), many viewers have hailed the film as a religious experience; many more time their drug hits in order to be stoned during the psychedelic final scenes.
2001 does have something going for it - its special effects are masterfully done and may be forever unsurpassed in terms of the visual spectacle they produce. (Kubrick garnered his one and only Oscar for this film, for Best Visual Effects.)
Also, this is a lesson in how to tell a story through images and sounds. Though it runs 141 minutes, there are less than 40 minutes of dialogue.
But as a commentary on the nature of humankind and the universe in which we live, it leaves a great deal to be desired.