dull, overrated

Rating: Null/10 (2 April 2001)

I'm a huge science fiction fan, and even like comically atrocious movies like "Battlefield Earth". And as 2001 seems to be widely considered a masterpiece, I can only say: I don't get it. The movie itself is incomprehensible. There's a saying about baseball that it's three minutes of action packed into three hours of game. That's kind of like this movie. Vast swaths of it contain nothing; like the scene where one of the astronauts jogs through the spaceship.
It's not a bad movie at all, it's just not one that I would see over and over again--perhaps it's supposed to be boring and make little sense. But even bewildering existential pieces should hang together, like "The Seventh Seal". In some ways I put the movie in the same category as "Star Trek: The Motion Picture". Long, long parts of the movie filled up with very clever special effects which were considered pretty gee whiz at the time. With computer generated fx these days doing amazing things, they're kind of tame. The best scenes in the movie are at the beginning with the widely known "apes coming into consciousness".
As I understand it Arthur C. Clarke and Kubrick didn't really know what the movie was supposed to be about while they were filming it and Clarke only published the book afterward and sort of filled things in. Its too bad, because it's an interesting story that might have improved if the the plot actually had been developed before filming. I like the idea of a movie that's not rushed, like many these days, and doesn't clock you over the head with simplistic themes. And 2001 does have an interesting concept. The sequel was more easily understood, but more dismissed.
All in all I was just kind of left with a confused feeling at the end, lots and lots of whys. The book sort of filled them in, but as a whole, the movie doesn't quite hang together. Enough to recommend seeing, but not enough to see again myself.