"Its greatest strength is also its greatest weakness..."

Rating: 8/10 (3 March 2016)

This is no doubt a masterpiece of filmmaking! Director Stanley Kubrick created a piece of cinematic history, which may even be called cinematographic art, by making this movie. Still I am here to argue if it is worth 10 stars or not... and as seen in my rating, despite me calling it a masterpiece, I gave 8/10. So why?
The most dominant factors, that make this movie so outstanding, are the use of sound and the use of picture. This movie combines these to create an incredible experience when watching it. Long takes, beautifully shot and carefully crafted, were paired with atmospheric music such as GyÃ¶rgi Ligetis "Atmospheres" or Richard Straus "Thus spoke Zarathustra" resulting in inconceivably beautiful scenes. The saying "Show! Do not tell!" is represented in its purest form by this movie. But what is its greatest strength is also, in my opinion, its greatest weakness. And as there are so many positive reviews about this movie already, I decided to focus on the negative aspects I noticed while watching it the first time. 2001-A Space Odyssey is a very slow-paced movie, probably the slowest one I have seen so far. This is caused by the fact that all of those long takes consume a lot of time. Therefore not much is happening in this movie. I would even consider saying that the main plot of the movie, which I am not going to spoil here, is primitive. It is straight forward and simple. It serves its purpose of guiding the audience through the scenes, but it does not more. A similar problem can be found within the characters. The acting is not particularly great, not because the actors are bad-they are not! Instead they do not have a lot screen time or dialogue and thus do not have any progression in their character. According to IMDb 88 minutes of this movie are without any dialogue. How can someone expect serious character development? And lastly the end, which I will not give away here. I will only say one thing: Kubrick himself said once that if someone understood his movie, he did something wrong. I understand that, because of that, the goal of the movie was to leave the viewer wondering about what he has seen. Still it is very disappointing to have so many unanswered questions at the end. Your mind is literally "blown away" by the ending and you have no chance of assembling it back together...
This may be criticism on a very high level, nit-picking so to say. But nevertheless this movie is a masterpiece, a must-see! In sight of all these positive reviews I just felt that some serious criticism is not out of place either as it has some problems as well. In the end I can only say... go see the movie already! What are you waiting for?