Ladysmith, 2001 is worth seeing, if only to be blown away that they did THAT in nineteen frickin' sixty-eight!
The space SFX and the quasi-realistic space hardware is better looking than almost the whole 30 years of space scenes in movies to come after it combined. And I include Star Wars and Star Trek in that. Only the Valley Forge of "Silent Running" re-used in the original and re-imaged Battle Star Galactica fleets, the long space-frame trusswork ship with the geodesic Agro-Domes, was a better looking realistic piece of space-hardware IMO. But unfortunately the rest of Silent Running's production values fell way short.
(Hint, uh yeah, the last plants and wildlife left in the entire solar system need sunlight, duh...)
And (at risk of spoilers) one of the points of 2001 and it's bare minimum of dialog was to make HAL, the Discovery's computer, more human and likable than either Dave Bowman or Frank Poole. A five-man crew several months into a year plus long mission to Jupiter, three of them in frozen hibernation they probably would talk about as much, or little.
And in 2001 you get a deeper sense of the cold lonely silent isolation of space than any other movie has ever given. IMO, only the opening landing scenes of "Alien" where the Nostromo lands on LV472 and finds the derelict Alien ship full of eggs come close.
