2001: A Space ..something..

Rating: 5/10 (20 August 2018)

This movie by Stanley Kubrick was made about 50 years ago, just a short time before the man actually set his foot on the Moon. Ironically, mankind still hasn't topped its achievement and we are way past year 2001 - talk about wrong priorities and wasted opportunities..
That said, I'd agree that this movie was ahead of its time and it was very ambitious in what it was trying to achieve and represent, and to some extent it did succeed. Considering all that, I still feel that this movie is over-hyped - it fails in one key aspect and that is storytelling. Basically it consists of 3 different acts where the only connecting piece is the mysterious monolith, the origin and purpose of which is very vaguely explained in the movie. It's kind of "make of it what you will" approach, which I personally didn't appreciate. The movie is based on a novel written by Arthur C. Clarke and I'll admit that I haven't read it, however reading the book first shouldn't be a pre-requisite for enjoying the movie. And that to me is one of the main issues.
We can talk about the symbolism in the movie all we want, but if the viewer is not given any information or explanation about what actual sense he or she should make out of this it just feels like a vacuum. Having some kind of narrator in the slow awkward parts (and I'll get to those later) would help this movie tremendously. Without it, those 3 acts are just stitched together like Frankenstein's monster and are expected to work by leaving an impression on the viewer. They do, but not in the right way.
At the end of it I was left with more questions than answers without getting any proper context or purpose and that is why my watching experience felt frustrating and pointless. I get that the intention was to keep it open for interpretation and debate, but, boy, that's one hell of a stretch.
On the positive side, the movie is impressive for the technological advancements it tries to represent (like portable screens, artificial gravity in the spaceship, hibernation pods, etc.) given the limitations of technologies that were available at the time. It uses neat tricks to achieve space illusions, which can definitely be commended. Funny enough, some of those technologies still don't exist in real life today.
That said, it does get plenty of the simple science wrong, like: pouring coffee in a cup on a space shuttle (good luck with that, when there's no gravity), showing Sun as a yellow star (while in fact it's white), pitch black space during the EVA scenes (while there should be plenty of stars seen), etc. The design of space ships/shuttles/pods depicted was highly impractical and funny, but can be overlooked in the grand scheme of things.
Another Achilles heel of the movie is the characters - they all have a personality of a wet mop. Didn't care for any of them. Actually the most interesting one was supercomputer named HAL in the final act. He struggles with his personality and purpose, that he's been programmed to do, which made this part of the movie somehow interesting and thought-provoking. One can clearly see, how HAL has influenced AIs and robots in other sci-fi movies, so kudos for that.
And last but not least - the pace of the movie. It's so slow that it makes snails look like cheetahs, I'm not kidding. I fully get what Kubrick was trying to achieve with this - to show how vast the space actually is and to highlight specific emotional points in the movie, but it borders on frustration of wasting viewers time. In many of those scenes you can easily go make a coffee or a sandwich and come back, and you wouldn't have missed a thing. Watching a space ship graciously glide through space for two and a half minutes isn't impressive nor breathtaking, when it happens for the forth or fifth time... The movie could've easily been 1 hour shorter and have exactly the same effect.
And to top it off, is the climax scene at the end which looks like a laser show at a trance party and might induce some epileptic seizures as it goes on for way too long. The controversial ending to me was actually less controversial than frustrating for the reasons I explained at the beginning, so I'll leave it at that.
In short, after staring at a black screen for two minutes and listening to some highly annoying noise in the background at the beginning of the movie, the viewer is greeted with the epic opening theme of 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' by Richard Strauss and the movie title. To me that was the most enjoyable part of the movie and it could just be ended there.
My score of the movie mostly represents the appreciation of its influence on the sci-fi genre that followed it. It would be way weaker, if released today.