I registered simply to warn others of how bad this movie is!!

Rating: 1/10 (10 December 2006)

A quick synopsis before I give specifics into why this movie is so painfully bad that I intend to DEMAND my $2.71 for rental of it. It make me stoopid. OK, not really but I'd rather sit through an Alicia Silverstone movie marathon than this again.
2 minutes of black screen with, as one other reviewer described it: what sounds like dying hippos. I'd liken more to audio recording of 3 simultaneous root canals, drills and all, with no Novocaine. But I digress. Next, we watch a lot of apes fight for supremacy (I dare not call them monkeys) of what I don't really know, though the waterhole they bathe in might be a good guess. Though they have non-verbal communication, they haven't figured out how to use tools. One of them touches the monolith (3D black rectangle that does nothing...or does it? Oooo) and ta-da! Now he grasps the concept of tools and learns how fight off the other apes. I'm not really sure how that's evolution, seems to point to Lamarck more than Darwin, but hey...
The next segment shows some guy's complete flight to a space-station where he has a conference about a monolith that's on the moon. No one knows or cares about the old one, by the way. It makes annoying sounds that deafens the astronauts when they try to touch it because no means no. It calls it's boyfriend to beat them up. OK the last part isn't true, but it would've been much more interesting. What I just described basically takes 45 minutes of your life that you will feel were stolen from you, even if you'd just planned on doing macramé instead. The signal it sends out is rather annoying and pointing at Jupiter. "Let's definitely go there" say the astronauts. We've already got Rosie O'Donnell, why not follow where THIS large rectangle of audible annoyance points us.
Great, now we're in a space station where a computer called HAL is on-board to help the astronauts on their mission. Here the actors muster all their strength to completely phone in their parts in what would almost be considered slightly more fascinating than your cousin's Christmas letter telling you how their little baby has started to say real words like...who am i kidding? you can't possibly care. I personally root for the evil computer. It seems to me that evolution for man could just as easily mean learning not to build technology that can defeat mankind. Duh. This is NOT Kubrick's take. Everything is pretty obvious. What a ripoff!! I saw that in the Simpsons and it took 7 minutes for the whole thing AND it was funny. I also thought that the South Park spoof was cleverer and far better paced.
Dave makes it passed Hal and can complete his mission. Apparently his mission is to go hurtling through space toward Jupiter while watching the predecessor to Laser Loggins goes disco. There's some psychedelic rays shooting at the astronaut for a long time. Eventually he ends up in a sterilized house where he's old. It's like a bad Neil Young song in slow-mo. Then there's a fetus floating in space. All this to the soundtrack of the most played out, obvious, annoying selections of art music. While there seem to be a lot of technically important advances in how this film was shot and quite a controversy over the meaning or intended meaning of the movie, none of that can help the fact that it is completely unfulfilling in almost every way. The people who praise it so much are narcissists who look to show off just how intelligent they are by coming up with some grand interpretation that's really more about making them appear smart than anything else. I love "Dr. Strangelove..." and "Full Metal Jacket" and other brilliant Kubrick films. This is NOT among them. 2001 should only make a top 250 films ever list if it involved candidates for Mystery Science Theatre 3000, except that the complete lack of dialog for the first 25 minutes would ruin even that.
intermission--I'll do the rest of my complaining in the comment board.