Stanley Kubric - bite my wire!

So I'm on this kick where I'm trying to watch all the movies on the AFI Top 100 Films of All Time List.

2001: Space Odyssey
Visually stunning.
Effects were.... hit or miss. Most of the "space" effects were just downright awful. Zero gravity effects were often contrived and seemingly illogical why any society would go to such great lengths to force a zero gravity atmosphere to behave as though it were not zero gravity instead of either embracing the floating fun or creating gravity - I have no idea. But at least it was consistently and artfully done so enjoyable to watch.

Sound was ANNOYING.
Okay Stanley Kubrick...so your an AARRTTist. We get it. That doesn't mean I want to listen to 5 minutes straight of dissonant, loud, high-pitched noise you are pretending is a sound track. So the zero sound in space appeased me to some extent, the sheer irritating quality of the sound that was presented when the film was not silent was just excruciating to the point that I turned it down despite my desire to push through for the sake of my own so-called cultural betterment.

Plot - existential tripe. So your sets and costumes are beautiful and extremely well done. Is that supposed to distract from me the tediously slow movement of the...well..for lack of anything else to call it...plot? Monkeys pretty. Got it. Monkeys loud and screechy. Got it. Monkeys territorial. Got it. Monkeys invent tool...and simultaneously, murder. Interesting. So it took five minutes of awful anticipatory music and fifteen minutes of shrieking ape men to make the point that this movie is about evolution and existence and progress and the place of "man" in the universe? At least Kubric was merciful enough to skip straight to the future space age instead of spending another twenty minutes inventing fire. Its that I did not appreciate how visually stunning the..er..prologue? was. Certainly I did. I also had great appreciation for the method of portraying the invention of tools and Kubrik's evident belief that this was the moment of evolutionary separation of beast and human. However, if you're going to make a movie about evolution or human-ness or the place of man in time or space, what's with HAL? Who cares about the homicidal malfunctioning computer? How does it have ANYTHING to do with the rest of the movie?

Okay.
Overall: 5/10, (5.25 weighted). Worth seeing - but only once, and only when you are in a patient mood. Feel free to skip the blank screen bad music bits and put it on fast forward during the tediously long bad visual effects I refer to as a disco kaleidoscope assuming you make it into the last third.
Visual/Art Direction: 8/10 (he loses points for the pseudo-Star Trek warp speed disco kaleidoscope)
Sound/Music: 0/10 (when the homicidal computer is the only thing pleasent to listen to in a two hour movie, you have problems)
Plot: 4/10 (2 points for human-ness plot, 2 points for the homicidal AI plot, 6 point penalty for having two entirely unrelated plots pretending to be a single movie)
Emotional Investment/Importance: 0/10 (I don't care about the monkeys. I don't care about the people. I don't care about the people. I don't care about the universe. And I don't think there's anything to learn here. I /would/ have thought this could be a 'ponder the big picture and how insignificant, yet important you are in it' flick given the evolution/human-ness plot, but then he went and ruined that with the whole homicidal HAL plot)
Happiness Factor: 0/10 (Happiness factor being 'things that make a person happy and elevate the mood.' Clearly not.)
Originality: 9/10. (This is hard to gauge as I'm seeing it out of the context of when it was created. However, it was released the same year as the lunar landing, prior to the personal computer, and two years after the Star Trek series began. Bonkers electronic beings and apce travel were not new concepts, but the quality of the portrayal of space for the time period is remarkable.)

My rating system: Each element is rated separately and do not impact the overall rating. The weighted overall rating is the average of the individual elements (less happiness as that is a specific-purpose-measure rather than an evaluation of the quality of the media in question).