Portentous, Pretentious, Prescient sci-fi movie, foregrounds themes over character

Rating: 9/10 (17 May 2015)

According to some, this is THE greatest science fiction cinema of all time - and frankly, if you don't like science fiction, you might like this movie anyway since it isn't really science fiction.
Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubricks story is more of a naval gazing, beard stroking summation of evolution, the quest for spiritual and physical transcendence, and a mystified, though emotionally effecting exploration of intelligible sources of 'higher power', or cosmic intelligence in the universe. According to the writers of 2001: A Space Odyssey, that source has been there since the cradle of civilization, transmitting messages that are, to us, signposts of evolutionary development; shown in the opening sequences of the film as the first instance of primitive tool use among our ancestors.
Needless to say, a major studio film as abstract, vastly ambitious, and frequently empty as 2001 could only be a product of the 60's era pseudo-spirituality. Also, the movies advanced concept of sci-fi production design was hugely influential on decades of sci-fi film, television and fantasy art, but aside from that, the actual "science" part of the story is boringly slow, features no remarkable human actors and doesn't really engage the audience with the promise suggested in the powerful opening sequences.
It appears, in addition to the massive "super-theme" (read: sci-fi influenced religious narrative), that Arthur C Clarke and his equally bespectacled co-writer Kubrick include a secondary story about the possibility of highly advanced, seemingly self aware computers, that communicate with the human characters in the "story" while carrying out technical mission assistance during space travel.
The movie is VERY slow, and it reverberates with the viewer afterward, as it shows a link between our largely geometric, four sided culture and intellectual advancement and the involvement of a powerful, though not entirely comprehensible alien force over the millenia. A fascinating theme, and a very well made film for its time, though basically so cold, ambiguous and leaden-paced that it feels like a task actually getting through. You could add at this point that the merit of a film is maybe not its entertainment value, but its commitment to realism, the intelligence of its themes and its sheer innovation (the film was staggeringly made back in 1967, looks decades ahead of time in terms of believable technology etc). This might be why critics make such elevated claims about the film. Basically, if you've ever wondered about intelligible life hundreds of millions of light years from our planet (everybody has), then this film deals with that subject, though in a way that treats the subject with consideration and depth that was unusual for science fiction cinema of its day.