I agree. After all these years, it's aged very badly

Rating: 6/10 (10 March 2016)

I can't give, and don't want to, give this movie less than a 6/10 rating. There is much in it to be enjoyed and admired. I am old enough to remember the original cinema release in 1967 but I probably didn't first see it in the early 70s.
It had a huge cult following even then and it was absolutely ground- breaking at the time; special effects were State of the Art and it's interesting even now to see the obvious product placement - PANAM (no-one envisaged Lockerbie and the end of PANAM did they), Howard Johnson's, Hilton etc.
But, things in the movie industry have changed a very great deal since this movie was made. Special effects are not everything even these days; we're often served up dross with little but special effects.
What I'm really trying to say here is that, like millions and millions of others, I enjoyed this movie at around the time it was released. Now, I'm afraid, it leaves me a bit cold. It looks awfully dated with special effects that are really not special any more, awfully long, pointless and boring periods of blank screen and no sound, tracking shots of spacecraft, apes that are a bit of a hairy joke and a sometimes annoying and over-done musical score. Zus Sprach Zarathustra was a great piece at the time the movie was made but how many times do we need to hear it in one movie? The same goes for the seemingly endlessly repeated Strauss.
No, it is a good movie, but it's no longer the great movie that it once was. Perhaps that is the tragedy for film-makers. Their once truly heroic performances lose a great deal of their color and vitality with the passage of time. And, regrettably, that's where 2001 sits these days. The truly great movies can and do stand the test of time. I'm think here of the likes of Butch Cassidy, The Sting, 12 Angry Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, Alien (just the original one made not long after 2001 but a much better movie) and even Kubrick's true masterwork The Shining. You know what I'm saying.
JMV