I think the maddening ambiguity you mention, along with the general aesthetic and ambition of the film all stem from a pretty fascinating synthesis. On one han

I think the maddening ambiguity you mention, along with the general aesthetic and ambition of the film all stem from a pretty fascinating synthesis. On one hand, you have a filmmaker who is really hitting his stride as an artist. Kubrick in the late 1960's not only had developed a solid command of his medium, but he was also a serious commercial proposition for Warner and was granted every resource at his hand. On the other hand, culture still had quite a modernist sensibility around space. We hadn't entered into the cynicism of the 70s that continues to color our perceptions today. 'Space' was this gigantic cultural construct that really captured people's imaginations. Perhaps a fair parallel may have been the romanticized expansion to the Old West. So I've always thought that this very fertile material, paired with peak-Kubrick, was always going to result in something ambitious and confounding for audiences.