Might be great, but wasn't for me.

Rating: 3/10 (17 January 2016)

I can understand why people see this as a classic movie because I think that for all the issues I have with it, it does have a thought provoking story. However, I still think it is perhaps the most overrated movie of all time for the simple reason that it shows too much of all the wrong things. Whether they were or not, it feels like Kubrick and company were showing off with their gigantic spaceship sets and dazzling light scheme at the end. It looks nice and everything, even fifty years later, but after about thirty seconds of seeing the ship traveling to Jupiter, I'm ready to see something actually happen instead of five more minutes of the exact same thing. The whole movie could probably have been about 80 minutes long, 110 would have been acceptable. I'm not denying that they did a good job on it, but I just couldn't keep my eyes open for most of it.
Some of my dislike for it might be a personal preference since I think that character is typically the most important aspect of a movie, and character is the main thing that 2001 lacks. People talk about how chilling HAL is as a villain, and I agree that he/it adds an interesting element to the plot, but he's nothing terribly special as villains go. As for Dave and Poole, you won't find more wooden protagonists in any movie. I think this was intentional to add to the overall feel of the movie and emphasize how small a force humanity really is and how little we know, but it's still worth noting that our characters are pretty bland.
The story follows a group of astronauts investigating a monolith that we are lead to believe has helped shape humanity. It starts off with about half an hour of showing apes transitioning from animals into sentient beings that had the capacity to use weapons and go to war with each other in a sense with the help of a monolith. Then we see modern (or at the time of release it would have been slightly futuristic) humans investigating another monolith on the moon. Eventually, the protagonist Dave has to gain control of his craft over HAL as they travel to Jupiter to continue the investigation. Then things get very weird to the extent that I would have a hard time explaining it in words. I don't quite know what happens at the end of the movie, and I didn't care to think it out after watching it because I was just glad it was over. I think Kubrick was trying to give us some form of really deep inspiration with the ambiguous and entirely unexplained ending, but it's a bit beyond me.
I don't know if fans of Kubrick will like this since I haven't seen any of his other material. I don't think it is likely to appeal to most modern audiences just because we like our movies to have a bit of a faster pace, but I wouldn't discourage anyone from giving it 30 minutes to try it out. I will warn you that the ape scenes are some of the more exciting moments of the film, though and that the tone changes quite a bit after that. So whether this deserves to be a classic is not something I'm can say with certainty, but it at least didn't fit my tastes. Overall Rating: 3.8/10.