A questionable drama of tediousness and hibernation.

Rating: 6/10 (1 January 2011)

I am a bit late at checking out this film. I had been interested in Stanley Kubrick's works after The Shining and A Clockwork Orange. I find myself wondering what the plot is meant to be in 2001: A Space Odyssey. For the majority of this film I was bored. Don't get me wrong, I'm no Roland Emmerich fanatic.
Nevertheless, this film suffers from what I feel is an overabundance of visual medium. Stanley Kubrick was an artist, and brought a style to his film-making I quite enjoyed in the films mentioned beforehand. Say what you want about Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, but it has a focus, it knew exactly what it wanted to be. With this film, I stand confused at it's conclusion.
A story of evolution intrigued me, the introduction tickled my fancy. The monolith of course had me confused, as intended by Kubrick, and I can see the impact such a mysterious object could be towards the film. Though, there is no speculation upon what the monolith is by what could be called the protagonists, and no real pay off for what you are initially curious about, and yet only see three times in the film.
The film's most interesting aspect were the scenes with HAL 9000 progressively malfunctioning, losing it's "mind" and turning against the obsolete beings in it's sense of superiority. So then you may believe that the film is meant to be of the horror genre. Then that's dismissed when HAL is put out of commission and Bowman is swallowed by a separate monolith which takes him through an initially interesting and spectacular but easily tiring phenomena. He finds himself aging in different points of view, and ends up old man on his death bed, before the monolith appears once again, turning him into a fetus-like form encased in a orb of light, looking over Earth. Alright, I get the symbolism, but what's the point?
I just feel that the film would have worked more as a slow building thriller, with HAL 9000 as the main antagonist. Instead we have this overbearing, ideological dribble. After about the 5th time I saw a work of machinery take much longer than need be to function, seemingly only to drag out every tiring scene just a little more aggravatingly longer.
In conclusion, wasted potential. A form of art that grows stale in overabundance. If any praise is to be given, it is to the special effects, which I will give credit where credit is due. The special effects are definitely ahead of their time. Other than that, well...nothing, really.