It's okay, you don't like the movie, we get it.

Rating: 10/10 (5 December 2011)

To those of you that wrote negative reviews: If you hate the film, that's fine, hate it, don't recommend it to anyone, bash it if you have to; I won't pretend to think that you "just don't understand it" because I happen to think that you do, just as much as you shouldn't pretend to be so profoundly confounded to understand how people genuinely love this film.
Writing a truly objective review of 2001: A Space Odyssey is virtually impossible. Being objective about it is as difficult an undertaking as understanding and contemplating the movie itself.
Love it or hate it, 2001 is here to stay. The enduring quality of this film is that it is all at once thought-provoking, brilliant, insightful, frustrating, and monumentally tedious, and a kin to hitting one's thumb incessantly with a hammer and loving it, yet some of us acquiesce and revel in delight in trying to write our own reviews as expressly as we can.
Everyone who loves the film fully understands why it's hated, and everyone who doesn't knows why it's a highly regarded art film.
In my opinion, and this is just my opinion: It is one of the greatest science fiction films of all time because it dares to challenge perception and asks and answers some of the greatest questions in life: Who are we? Where did we come from? What are we doing here? And where are we going? As a result, we agree to disagree on the merits of the film.
2001 is enigmatic. So much time is spent (some would say wasted) waiting: waiting for a ship to dock, waiting for dialogue, waiting for adventure, waiting for a narrator that will never come. Each of us has to be our own narrators, and that's a tall order to ask of any movie-watcher with stars in his or her eyes.
As a fan, I agree, the movie is very tedious, but deservedly so, and that's okay. I accept the pace. The pace was purposeful and Stanley Kubrick took many artistic licenses. I don't expect everything to be handed to me on a silver platter in easy to understand morsels of flashy special effects, fast-paced action, and intense melodrama.
It's a foregone conclusion that the film was loved and hated back in 1968, it's loved and hated in 2011, and it'll be loved and hated in the future. Yet somehow we keep talking about it, debating it, and that's what makes it virtually timeless.