It's like I met pretentiousness face to face and it spit at me.

Watch for the visual, sound and atmosphere, stay away if you want something resembling a storyline, actually explored ideas or decent characters (The only thing resembling an actual character is, in fact, an AI).

This movie is said to have "a huge story arc spanning from the dawn of man to the space age" (as said by certain fans). Which is complete bullshit. It starts with the so called 'dawn of man', and then makes a massive skip to the space age.

It starts off interesting enough, presenting the setting and building up around the mystery of the monolith, but then in the second half there's this huge gap in the movie that pretty much means nothing to the overarching plot: the HAL incident. It's just a big excuse to get Dave alone for the finale (Who is pretty much just a plot device) and which could be it's separate movie entirely. All the while the monolith has been completely forgotten, nothing has been built upon or expanded since, having around 30-40% of the movie wasted.

Then we have the finale, without any sort of context for either the character, the events or the themes, trippy shit starts happening and we are supposed to fanwank around it because it makes it deep for deep people such as ourselves and, highly unconventional and refined. We could literally fanwank that the monolith is a giant drug device from the future that gives people trippy dreams and is connected with other drug devices from the future so many people around the universe can trip together, and you could literally not refute it because, fuck if anything is supposed to make sense, just fanwank something. Well, this certainly is unlike conventional storytelling, because it cannot be called storytelling.

It's technical excellence for it's time, and the science aspects are certainly quite there, it even has an interesting atmosphere, but in the end it's all about flash and style over actual substance.

With this I've finally understood the true meaning of DEEP.