I'm honestly glad Kubrick didn't go with Clarke's narration. Kubrick was a filmmaker and Clarke was a writer. While abstract and nearly impossible to understand without the book, the movie and book work amazingly well together as a unit. With concrete first order explanation at the end the sense of profundity wouldn't have been there. The aliens and their machines are vastly beyond human comprehension, and the arc of man's evolution was absolutely poetic. It would have been dated and corny with direct visual and vocal explication. The movie drew me to book, not the other way around.
Thanks for sharing your opinion. Probably you could tell from the tone of my comment, but I don't like the movie the way it is. I agree with you that the movie and the book work well together but I wish the movie worked as a standalone piece of art.
I think Kubrick and Clarke could have perhaps found a compromise. For example, I remember liking the ending part of the movie "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" by Spielberg which had a similar situation to the last sequence in 2001. I don't recall if that movie had any explicit explanation of what the beings at the end were but it was pretty clear who they were and what they were doing from the way the movie handled things.
Yeah I'm not hard headed about it and get that it's not for everyone. I'd be open to other possibilities for how the ending was handled. I definitely don't think direct narration would have worked though. The voiceovers in the theatrical cut of Blade Runner are almost universally disliked. Some less subtle hints like you say could have worked.
I thought Spielberg ruined AI btw. But that's a different topic. I thought the final scene was the only good one in the movie. The imagery and implications stuck with me for decades.
I agree with everything in your comment, including about AI. The last 30 minutes of that movie amazed me but I didn't like much of what came before that.
