What in the hell did I just watch? This movie is THE absolute worst, most boring, pointless, and just plain stupid movie that I have ever made my eyes witness. I used to rate movies on a good to bad scale of fantastic to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but 2001 just broke that scale by an unspeakable feat.
I don't give a damn if this movie is supposed to be completely up to interpretation by its audience - the movie is based around pointless and utterly slow sequences of showing something move from point A to B, so explain to me how this is supposed to be entertaining. It was like the Blues Brothers all over again! I don't watch movies to figure out why a dying old coot becomes a giant fetus overlooking a planet that's as big as its head because that's just so out there, so blatantly absurd that there's no point in trying to conjure any sort of meaning of it.
Cut out the nonsense and they'd have a fantastic short film, but thanks to the ten minute scenes of tripping balls and watching a metallic eyeball probe go out to salvage a dead body in space this feature length film is nothing short of a terrible attempt at an open-ended movie. Something I hate with a passions about movies and sometimes books is when the creators actually have a goal to make a movie about basically nothing, leaving practically everything up to interpretation. People like that are basically the pretentious modern art bastards of the film industry.
Seriously though, I adored the portions of the movie that actually made sense and weren't unnecessarily drawn out, especially the whole HAL segment. The "dawn of mankind" beginning, human discovery of the monolith, and HAL parts were great, and together would have pieced together a marvelous short film.
But they didn't, and now this movie is my least favorite of all time.
