Would have been better on drugs

Rating: 5/10 (29 November 2013)

Although this movie had it's moments and it was quite artistically beautiful to watch, I'm gonna have to side with the people saying this movie is too slow, a bit on the boring side, not really any point to it, etc.
Some of the scenes like the ship landing on the moon and going slowly downwards to land with the fancy music, I was just literally thinking what is the point of this? Is it REALLY going to show the ship go all the way to the VERY bottom??? At least it cut if off like halfway wow, so slow!
There just seemed to be a lot of very slow and boring shots. Yes some of them were nice to look at but maybe I'm just impatient I processed the information pretty fast I don't need to see basically the same shot for an extra 10-100 seconds for every scene...
And it seems that the lack of dialog was done intentionally, I think this was a mistake. Even though all the dialog was pretty basic it was some of the more interesting parts of the movie to me. They really should have done a bit more with the whole HAL going psycho thing and them trying to figure out what to do. Instead he makes one little mistake and they instantly freak out and plot his death right in front of the camera. It was obvious to me watching the scene in the pod for the first time that HAL would be able to know what was said whether by manually activating the microphones in the pod or with the camera I wasn't sure.
And then HAL kills the guy and he goes flying off into space and his team member is just like oh darn better collect his corpse. No emotion, no anger, it's like he's a robot just like HAL or something. Was this intended? I don't know it just could have been so much more of an intense and interesting story with some slight differences.
Kubrick says he didn't take any drugs but I find that hard to believe when watching this movie sober. This really seems like something someone on mushrooms, LCD, or just baked out of his mind on Marijauna would direct.
I'd still give it at least a 5/10 just because for it's time it must have been quite a visual feat, and it still looks good so many years later. But I was just expecting so much more to happen and it's like they did the bare minimum and just tried to like do beautiful or trippy cinematography to appeal to druggies or something. Apparently their plan worked as I guess their biggest audience in the theaters were people getting high to watch the psychedelic wormhole scene.
I also really don't understand the ending with the wormhole and the weird room and his aging and rebirth, but given the intentional lack of story/context/events in the movie I don't really think there is a good explanation no matter how much you analyze it so I won't give it much of a second thought.
This movie kind of reminds me of how I saw "Avatar" 3D on mushrooms. It was the most intense and visually amazing thing I've ever seen and when I got out of the theater I was just like "wow, that was the most amazing thing I've ever seen." But now I'm scared to watch it sober because it will probably be just a huge let down when the visuals don't just blow my mind, that's how I feel about 2001: A Space Odyssey. Maybe give me a ton of mushrooms and I could see what some of you see with this one.