Only the most pretentious art house junkies need apply

Rating: 4/10 (28 June 2002)

Ah, the sweet irony of a vast "Savannah" of pseudo-intellectuals in worshipful praise of a film with Darwinism as a central theme! And after watching this thing, painfully, for the third time the only imagery I'm left with is a bunch of baboons sitting at a keyboard with pipe smoke swirling overhead ranting on about the stunning grandeur of it all. Please. You want to be one of the sheep, or a shepherd? If evolution exists then one can naturally conclude that part of the process is the ability to think for oneself. Apparently that's not the case. If you want real entertainment, pour yourself a drink and take an hour or so to read through the reviews posted on this site. But keep an "open mind" OK? I guarantee you more entertainment value than you will find by sitting through this borefest. 2001 is an example of technological craftsmanship and that's about it, other than a monument to a director's out of control self-indulgence.

But I have an idea of how we can add some entertainment spice to this film-let's make it interactive...sort of like Rocky Horror. We can do a "shirts and skins" thing, and pass out Mastodon femurs to all the patrons, pro and con, then sponsor a free-for-all about halfway through the movie with the winners deciding whether it's worth sitting through the balance of this "masterpiece." I'm betting that all we "troglodytes" that despise this movie will win that battle everytime, no matter how greatly outnumbered. Now there's a statement about "evolution" that you can sink your teeth into.

OK, now that the brawl is over let's look at Kubrick himself and what his true vision for 2001 may have been. If you consider the balance of his most successful work they all have insanity or some sort of personal haunting dementia as it's primary theme...the insanity of war, destructive obsessiveness, etc. And if you apply this thought process, or "vision", to 2001 then the natural conclusion one might arrive at is this.....it's already interactive, Kubrick designed it that way to inspire the natural selection process in his audience thereby segregating us into two classes-the one group that will identify with James Mason's "Lolita" character as an obsessive, sexually repressed perverted intellectual, and the other that will no doubt be driven insane after sitting through this overlong snore-a-thon.... thus connecting us all eventually to the quirky genius behind camera. I like Kubrick for the most part and on balance I suppose I can even forgive him for butchering "The Shining" but in the final analysis "2001" is a dull and lifeless space opera that may fire off a neuron or two but it doesn't pass for entertainment. 5/10 SKINS RULE!