Too dull, very pretentious, self-indulgent, and incomplete

Rating: 6/10 (13 December 2017)

This film gets all its well established notoriety and popularity from how philosophically suggestive it is, for the questions it asked, and for its penchant for visual imagery and artistic visions.
A film is only as poignant as its scenes are during the actual viewing time, not days later when thoughts are compiled together to the point of creating a layer that practically exists on its own independently from the film itself. If the film depicts something profound then it should be felt as the viewer is watching, the methods assembled to convey a thought or concept should be efficient enough for the viewer to be submerged with emotion as he's actually watching. This film settles for grazing questions, for suggesting there might be interesting things to be found here, for merely opening up drawers loaded with files without ever picking one and pointing to an interpretation. It's too vague to even be abstract in quality, it's just random. There's a sort of meaning behind it all, but no closure on any of the notions being touched on - and the worst problem is even if there were, it would be so darn CRYPTIC it would just be a ridiculously overcomplicated confusing way to achieve its goal. The film creators are in the obligation as professionals of supplying the right elements for the viewer to understand the point being made, or else, he's not really even saying anything, it's just words and phrases floating in midair.
The whole concept of AI becoming sentient and taking over on its own initiative was older than this novel or film so A Space Odyssey can't be awarded the full credit for the original idea, it was merely borrowing the thought of the evil computer machine turning on its human creator, without adding any more flavor to it, and building a scene around the notion to be inserted into a mainstream production. It's well made, but that's all. The conspiracy against the two human individuals was carried out in a completely linear fashion and the protagonist's return to the ship and dismantling of HAL 9000 was just execution of the narrative.
On the monolith: it's interesting in concept, and the genuinely anguishing ghost music in the background is efficient along with the ominous camera angles... but again, it's all up for interpretation of the wildest kind. Some far-fetched ridiculously cryptic explanations can be found out here on the internet, but the most sensible one for me was the monolith was simply the catalyst to human development: the person was describing how the monolith was a perfect geometrical figure with straight angles and perfectly straight lines, which would in a somewhat symbolic way inspire the apes to progress and adopt the underlying concept of precision and therefor moving forward into technological advancement (hence the tools later, so on..). Too vague a meaning anyways past the ape stage really...
The film is intentionally very slow-paced which isn't a problem in itself only that the slowness is directly associated with the pompous attitude of the film: a movie that starts off with a pitch-black screen and 5 whole minutes of abstract soundtrack music, repeated later in the film, classical music used several times during scriptless scenes... the artsy fartsy psychedelic trip at the end which is really the film-makers discovering a new technology at the time and abusing its most basic functions for about 15 minutes straight.
As a whole it does look absolutely great however: the space ships are very detailed in design and actually look real hovering in space, the futuristic technology and furniture and overall colors and shapes are interesting and quite pleasing aesthetically. It should be said as of this writing some 50 years after its release it really aged fantastically well and the imagined novelties of the future still don't come across as ridiculous as in most such films' visions.
The ending scene is, again, poetic, thought-provoking... but doesn't cop out from the film's general ineptness at being clear and taking responsibility for saying something tangible and exact and further contributes to the pretentious attitude of this Kubrick "masterpiece".

Some films are misunderstood, some films are over-understood...6/10.