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The film makes perfect sense if you read it as pure visual narrative.
Agreed. It's not simply one of the best science-fiction movies ever made—probably THE best—but also one of the best of any movies ever made, period.
There's plenty in that final 30 minutes, and it has nothing to do with LSD. It's a transformative & visionary experience, for those with eyes to see it.
No mention of The Prisoner yet?
Why can't works of art that are challenging also be entertaining? They can be both, you know.
The ending isn't a failure, but a triumph. Bowman (and by extension, all of humanity) is plunged into an experience far beyond his comprehension, something far greater & overwhelming than he could ever begin or hope to understand. The viewing audience is supposed to feel that as well. Yet as the audience, we have just enough distance to understand that Bowman is undergoing an astonishing transformation because of that experience. He's making a leap as vast as the leap between that primal man-ape tossing the bone into the sky & instantly cutting to the orbiting weapon station. We can't hope to comprehend what Bowman has become & can now understand, any more than the man-ape could have understood the world of 2001. Yet there's a linking thread of growth that connects that man-ape to the ascended Bowman. And who knows how much more he will change & grow in the future?
It's immensely enjoyable to me, but not in the constantly rewatchable way that other favorites are. I like to watch it every couple of years or so as an experience that's moving, intense, reflective—and that's a different sort of enjoyment, an overwhelming one. But definitely quite enjoyable!
Having first seen it when it came out in 1968, and having seen it many times since, I find nothing silly, pretentious, or boring about it. It's not your typical film, I'll grant you. It's a film whose narrative & complexity are told in purely visual terms. It's more of a symphonic tone poem than anything else, meant to be experienced more than analyzed. At least that's been my lifetime experience of it. Yours may differ & nothing wrong with that.
Sadly, all too many Americans do act like that in movie theaters. Sometimes worse than that. They consider the theater to be an extension of their living room, rather than a public space where consideration for others should be practiced. To them, rudeness & boorishness equals "freedom" … although "freedumb" is a better word for their behavior.
The book is enjoyable. But you don't need it to see the film. In fact, reading it detracts from the primal experience of the film. The book is prose. The film is poetry.
You don't need to read the book to understand the ending, nor does it have anything to do with LSD.
I first saw it when it came out, when I was fourteen, along with my 9th grade science class. None of us had any difficulty with the ending, discussing it excitedly on the bus trip back from the theater. And it's not as if we were particularly exceptional students, either; we were all pretty average, mostly B students, a couple of C students, a couple of A students.
The ending is perfect, in fact, because the protagonist is experiencing something completely beyond his comprehension. It has to be ambiguous! But it was clear to us even then that it was about the encounter with something far greater than any human being had experienced, and his resulting mental & physical transformation into something greater because of it. And the very ambiguity of the ending is what enables the film to retain so much of its power to this day, even after repeated viewings over the decades.
A big part of the problem for some viewers seeing it for the first time today is that the zeitgeist has changed. Allegory, symbolism, the film as tone poem: all of that & more was in the air in 1968. We breathed it, we lived it, we experienced it in society & in popular culture just as a matter of course. Today geek culture has narrowed imagination by demanding that everything be explained down to the last detail, that everything must fit neatly together without any room for nuance or paradox. A lot of current viewers simply want to be spoon-fed. (Not all, mind you. And there were plenty who didn't get the ending back then, either.)
In short, it's not a film to be analyzed so much as it is to be experienced. Are you experienced? Have you ever been experienced? Well, some have ...
Harry and Tonto