Lost in middle-of-the-fence outer space

Rating: 7/10 (26 February 2013)

I watched 2001 expecting to be engrossed from start to finish, absorbed in the plot and visuals, but I wasn't.
I made a mental note of how many times I slightly nodded off during the film, a total of eight, the biggest one at the end where I had to rewind to the journey sequence to Jupiter, which I fast forwarded again until I got some proper visuals of Bowman getting old.
But for all the negative points above, I did enjoy the film.
I'm therefore going to attempt to address some points that I haven't seen mentioned in the fifty or sixty reviews on IMDb I've already read.
Firstly the positive.
At first I thought the apes looked a little too much like men in costumes, until I realised they were supposed to look like that, especially at the end of this section when the aggressor apes become different in stature, more upright and visibly stronger and able to manipulate objects. The apes were vulnerable, and that was nice too.
There's a section where the scientist calls his daughter on the advanced intercom device to wish her happy birthday and apologise for not being there, probably included by Kubrick to wow us back in 1968 as to what future intercom technology would be like, but it was a nice scene nonetheless, especially the distracted but still attentive nature of the little girl. I also appreciated the way $1.70 was charged for the call, pretty much like pre-paid credit in the modern age.
The interior designs of the spaceships were really impressive and beautiful, although the chairs in the Hilton were bizarre. The curved aspects of the walkways, reflecting the round outer design of the spaceships seen from space was a nice touch too, with the interior design, snappy male suits and beautiful air-hostesses with weird hats, a real treat. While eating spacefood slop, each astronaut watched the news on his 1968 iPad equivalent, for example.
HAL 9000 was the best part of the movie for me, especially his voice and calm rationale. Fixed camera settings on the red eye, the outline of his computer casing on the panel, in between eight or so flat screens. If you've seen 'Moon' with Sam Rockwell and the computer voice played by Kevin Spacey, you'll get extra joy from the deadpan HAL. The use of display panels in general was a real surprise too, sometimes simplified with a background colour and a single, abstract word.
As to the negative.
The HAL and character development part of the film was not enough. What should have been a dialogue between crew members concerning gradual suspicion about the motives of HAL turned into a simple "let's switch him off because he made a single improper diagnosis". HAL reacts to the threat of being switched off by eliminating the crew instead, which is fair enough from a computer's point of view, resulting in a single survivor eventually getting the upper hand and managing to achieve the desired disconnect sequence himself. I really loved the pleading by Bowman, asking HAL to let him back on board, followed, in contrast, by the pleading of HAL not to be switched off once the tables had turned.
The space travel sequences were dull though. The outer space visual effects are praised by even the biggest critics of this film, but there is no real sense of perspective when spacecraft move across the screen, often feeling like cheap camera panning tricks used back in 1968. The visual effects in Star Wars just ten years later are better than this, in my opinion.
The music was too much, going on and on and on, overly loud, repeating the Blue Danube at an extremely intruding level.
Everything was just too drawn out and long in between scenes, obviously for the sake of art. I recently watched 'The Tree of Life' with Brad Pitt and really liked it, but funnily enough, the abstract scenes bored me in this film.
For all that, I'm pretty on the fence overall. I like parts of it, dislike others. If Kubrick had concentrated on the plot and character development, for me this film would have been much better and less soporific. The parts of the film that were based around characters and interior design were terrific, but the space scenes were mostly uninteresting. And that's the surprise. I expected the opposite - terrific space visuals and a pretty boring story, instead of a pretty dull space movie with invigorating characters and brilliant interior design.