A Complete Waste of Time

Rating: 3/10 (2 August 2001)

This is one of those films that a lot of people claim to like. So I was incredibly surprised how terrible it was, especially since I usually enjoy Kubrick films.
The film begins with a 15 minute intro sequence picturing apes at the "dawn of man." It lasts only 15 minutes, but feels like an hour. For plot, the apes are visited by a large black monolith which appears one morning amidst their tribe and somehow sparks evolutionary developments in the monkeys. This is followed and preceded by meaningless time-killing ape scenes.
Skip ahead to the year 2001, where another large black monolith has appeared on the moon. (IIRC, this film was originally a short story entitled "The Sentinel", so I suppose the monolith was meant to mark humankind's progress.) The black stone sends a signal out into space, so a mission to investigate Jupiter (presumably the destination of the signal) is launched.
The third part of the film then begins, as the astronauts depart for Jupiter. This is the part of the film familiar to those of us who hadn't seen it, featuring the supercomputer HAL and his descent into evil. This is really the only redeeming part of the film, it's too bad the rest of the film wasn't like this. The scene where the astronauts are discussing the disassembly of HAL in supposed privacy, and we then see HAL reading their lips, is very eerie and quite chilling.
Unfortunately, the film goes totally off the wall when the mission arrives at its target. A strange and seemingly pointless barrage of flashing streams of color start flying across the screen, broken only occasionally by the remaining astronaut's frightened face. After about 10 minutes (I'm not kidding, it's that long) we see the astronaut in some strange place, which the film implies is somehow outside of time, where he ages and dies over a few minutes. Then, cue the space baby...roll credits.
Considering that a lot of people on this site can't even understand the very simple ending of the new Planet of the Apes movie, I can't understand why this film managed to get such good marks. Even the people I know who claim to like this film always seem to dodge the question when I ask them to explain this movie. The few good points are: the apes' first post-monolith change is discovering the use of weapons (a relevant commentary on humanity), and the soundless nature of space (nothing bothers me more than hearing explosions in the vacuum of space.) Other than a few good moments, this film is entirely rubbish. Please DO NOT WATCH THIS FILM, YOU WILL REGRET IT!