I get it, but I just don't like the end.

Rating: 9/10 (22 October 2006)

I get it, I get it. The first three parts of this essentially four-part film are varying degrees of great. The "Dawn of Man" segment looks a little dated, but it's undeniably a classic segment of cinema. The "Sentinel" segment on the moon sets up the tone, casualness and general laziness of the film (please don't read the word "lazy" in any negative sense. The amount of attention to detail is staggering in this movie, but the feel is still best described as lazy - leisurely and for the most part banal. This is completely intentional on the part of Stanley Kubrick, of course.) The "Hal" segment is without a doubt the greatest segment, with incredible use of silence and slowness as a suspense-building mechanism, the unforgettable "daisy" scene, etc etc. This segment is what proves to me that this movie knows exactly what it's doing.
Which can only lead me to conclude that it knows what it's doing in the trippy final "beyond infinity" segment. Heck knows, no-one else knows, but people love it: they call it poetic, inspirational, mind-expanding and so forth. I won't deny that people can get very strong emotions from the ending.
My problem is that this segment is undeniably super-pretentious. It would look weird in Bruñuel movie. French cinema don't even give us this sort of completely humorless symbolism, the kind where you can almost hear the director sitting behind the camera, thoughtfully scratching his beard under his french beret and pondering the bleakness of existence when he really needs to unbutton the top shirt button and chill the hell out.
(I get it, by the way. The star-child is the next step of human evolution, guided by the monolith just like in the beginning, bla bla)
I was disappointed that Kubrick chooses to end his epic film like this. It crosses the line from entertainment into "if you don't get this it's because you're stupid" territory. And if, as has been stated many times, he can't be any less vague because no-one knows the answers to the questions he's posed, he has no business making this movie in the first place. Because it's a movie, not a documentary. You invented the monolith, so get off your hiney and tell us more about it, OK?