Pete Talbot’s review published on Letterboxd:
I'd love to give this the full five-star treatment but the lack of narrative and because it has a feeling of incompleteness as it was made back in the SFX stone age of 1968. That is not to say that the effects of 2001 are not good, in fact many of them are still quite amazing (I could watch that pen float all day, for example). The problem is that a lot of the ambiguity and symbolism, while a lot of it is quite thoughtful, is a bit of a jumble of BS vagueness with the purpose of adding confusing without purpose other than to say "the universe is mysterious." Kubrick was a fan of the idea that he could have three stories that are loosely connected and have them in the same movie like a series of short stories rather than a single story. This is probably the best example of that process working, and Full Metal Jacket is the worst (the movies I've seen).
This is not a review meant to rag on 2001 as I really enjoyed this viewing. It moves along better than I remembered and that is perhaps because I have been watching a lot of older movies of late. I had a feeling on this viewing of noticing that there aren't any scenes that don't have great purpose to the film even if they are not especially quick.
It's quite incredible how much of this film is either culturally significant (Everything HAL, fighting apes, the visual trip through the monolith) or established sci-fi troupes (at one point I thought to myself "that's a Star Wars docking bay!"). This is still quite watchable and it's a bit surprising that the sound design and score haven't been emulated after all of these years.