Why I hate 2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey is my least favourite film of all time. I don't think I've finished a movie feeling angered--as if I'd wasted my time--before or since. A friend of mine was really shocked to hear this, so I thought I'd write about it.
First off, I think 2001 is a bad film; though I feel it's quite awful, I know it did some things well, and featured some cutting-edge direction. It has an innovative film score, groundbreaking special effects, and that bit 3/4 of the way through the film with HAL 3000 is fascinating. In this way, I suppose I see why the film is so well-liked.

The problem is, 2001 is dreadfully boring and pointless. Let's start with boring: almost every scene in the film is stretched far longer than it needs to be to get its point across. I remember in particular one scene where a space shuttle was simply flying across the moon; to illustrate that, Kubrick (the director) shot a scene where a shuttle flies slowly across a barren moonscape--FOR OVER 20 SECONDS. I don't know how long it was exactly, but it was at least that long, and I got the message easily, and long before that 20 seconds was up. (The message? "Some people are travelling across the moon in a shuttle." There wasn't much moon scenery to note.) Worse, the climax of the film is 20 minutes (minutes!) of flashing lights. What purpose does that serve? 3 minutes into that "scene", I think I got the picture. There are many, many scenes like this--even the few scenes with dialogue in the film are spoken slowly and dryly. sometimes I wish Michael Bay would be around to direct this thing, because at least he'd have the decency to blow something up.

I suppose a boring film would be all well and fine if it had a good point to make about something, and made it well. 2001: A Space Odyssey does neither of those things. The film has a lot of interesting imagery, recurring symbols, etc.: giant black monoliths appearing at different points in space and time, for example. but the film is so vague and indefinite so often that you can't connect the odd images with anything real. There are no clear answers in this film, which means the audience has to slog through this movie only to find that those slow, symbolism-heavy scenes don't have anything to say.

My complaint with the film, then, is that it fails to entertain. It has nothing to say: the film asks you to sit through 2 1/2 hours of slow-moving drama, and then has the indecency to demand that you decide the film's meaning for yourself. That might sound shallow, but a boring film without meaning fails to satisfy any purpose as a film. Sure, the rich imagery will have appeal to some--but then, perhaps the book version would be better. You could read that at any pace you like, and I hear the book is clearer, too.

Recent thoughts

Well, I've been learning a lot of interesting stuff at school, and I thought I'd touch on a few things briefly. If there's enough interest, I'll explain these things in more detail down the road:

-So yeah, humans might not have character traits. In my moral psychology class, we learned that if you take a person and put them through tests to see if they're courageous, they will only be consistent in making courageous or timid actions 10%-20% of the time. That's pretty inconsistent! That's why some people (situationists) say that people are moral or immoral based on the situations they are brought up in.
-So, I have like 3 philosophy classes that are getting all huffy over the idea that all of our actions are determined. The idea is, every act we do is based on our own previous actions and the environment in which we were raised to the extent that any decision we make, we were determined to make. That is to say, if you're deciding whether to go to Western University or Ottawa University and you have more reasons to pick Ottawa University, you will pick Ottawa University. (Sorry, Western. I hear you're a fine school.)
This doesn't bug me, to be honest. When I was a kid, I used to think that if you had an epic computer and were to input all the information about life in the universe, you could predict everything that happens next. (Apparently, that was actually a rather famous concept in the 19th century; quantum physics would dispel a lot of this with its randomness, but there's not enough randomness to say that determinism doesn't work for practical purposes.)
-I learned how to propertly use a urinal! Yay!!!ONE!
-The reason people are bugging about determinism is that if everything in the world, including our actions, are determined, then some infer that we don't have free will! that's a pretty big issue, I hear. I think it's silly, though: if I were to jump in a pool and someone yelled "you were determined to do that! You were always going to do that!" at me, I'd be like, "So? It's not like there was anything stopping me."
-Citizen Kane is an awesome film. It lived up to the massive wall of hype.
-People are hypocrites. That is to say, if you tell someone that everything in a world is determined, but then tell them some violent, ruthless revenge story and ask if the criminal was fully responsible for his actions, most people will say yes; if you just straight-up ask "is a person in this world responsible for his or her actions?", most people will say no. And if you ask the people who said 'yes' a few weeks later why they chose an apparently-contradictory position, about 50% will stick with 'yes' and 50% will switch to no. I thought it was funny when I was reading that study that people would go into it thinking 'people will say that a person is determined with bare facts, but will be swayed by emotion when told a powerful story. In other words, people are dumb.' And then I read the rest of the article.
-I'm in a Film Music class, which is teaching me the history of early film. It's a fascinating subject--did you know Thomas Edison was a monopolistic b------? It's true! And we watch a lot of cool movies, like The Jazz Singer, the first movie ever with sound, and Psycho, the original (HITCHC--- ROCKS!)
Also, I've still been showing movies on my floor at residence. Every weekend, I show a movie in the common room, and every weekend, 0-4 people show up. Aside from the fact that no one's coming, that's going pretty well. That IS an important fact, though.