overall pretentious, but very astonishing from a lot of technical ways.

Rating: 5/10 (1 November 2018)

This film is brilliant in some ways and a complete bore in other ways. In terms of creating a visual and auditor wonder the film is very successful. The visual quality still holds up very well today and it's astonsihing imagining a lot of these effects being accomplished. If someone was tasked with making a film like 2001 without CGI today they would be totally lost. And even with CGI it might not look as good as this film still looks without CGI.
In terms of creating an interesting story, the question of whether or not the film fulfills they goal is much more in doubt. The artificual intelligence narrative is interesting and way ahead of its time. But the pacing seems extraordinarily slow today. During some sequences I wonder if the music break or the visual display of crazy confusing colors will ever end.
There is also a certain appeal to abstract thoughts within the film. And I love such conversations and ideas. I make abstract visual art myself. But if I was making a two and a half hour film I wouldn't spend half of the film subjecting viewers to abstract images which are largely empty of much tangibly understood meaning.
Some people claim that if you don't like this film, you don't understand art or appreciate culture or philosophy or science or anything. And to those people, I say bite me. I appreciate all of that stuff. And you don't really demonstrate appreciating any of it if you pretend to like a piece of art which only seems special to you I n some specific ways, and oppose it overall. What makes art Interesting is our ability to disagree and converse civilly about the merits for liking or withholding approval of each piece of art. For me I see a lot of content in this film which could have been assembled into a great story. But I see an execution much more interested in not telling much of a narrative, but instead focused on showing off what could be done with aesthetics and the unknown components available to us in the topics of space and science fiction. That's why I find the film pretentious overall but admirable in terms of many detailed components.
For Kubrick I see Dr Strangelove or The Paths of Glory as his two best films. I'm not sure this one would even make my top 5. Although I'm willing to concede that this film might have made the biggest impact of all of his films in terms of demonstrating his ability to master special effects and a sense of wonder. To me that's just not what makes a film good versus bad.