Kubrick and Clarke. Twice the mastery. No wonder it's perfect.

Rating: 10/10 (12 December 1999)

Let me tell you about the first time I saw this film. It had been released only a few years earlier and was evidently still playing in cinemas. My father took me to see it one day. It would have been around 1971, and I was 5 years old. I don't remember much clearly, and at that age I doubt most people could, however one scene was etched into my mind. It was of course the ending, where Dave emerges from his pod into the room. Why did this scene have such an impact? Not because of its significance to a 5 year old, but because it was at the point in the film that my father told me we could go because there was nothing more to see. He then attempted to usher me from the theatre. Apparently, he explained, the "space epic" was over. I was unconvinced and insisted that we stay until the end (you know, when the credits role?). What I saw from that point remains with me not just due to its unique nature, but specifically because it was deemed to be not worth seeing by my father - someone who's opinion I valued and trusted. Although this time, I knew that missing this scene would have been a mistake I would regret in later life. I may have been only 5 years old, but I could tell something significant was happening here, and in a strange way, I have my father to thank for drawing attention to it!
It was years before I saw the film again, all the while remembering that occurrence of years earlier where it was deemed that the ending to this film actually occurred before the final scene. Why? Upon viewing the film again as an adolescent, I realised why. It is because this is the exact point in the film is where it transcends a number of commonly held notions. It transcends the notion of a "space movie". It transcends the explicable. And it transcends the accepted conventions of cinema. I could see that my father was motivated by fear. The fear that my first words upon leaving the cinema would be "What did that mean?". A question he could not answer, or perhaps did not think it was possible to explain to a 5 year old.
Go to see this film, and if you find yourself thinking it is incomprehensible (or worse, has no script, direction, theme, etc.) then force yourself to watch it to its conclusion and then watch it again until you understand. Because this film contains, in it's entirety the largest idea ever put forth in a science fiction film, if not in films of all kinds. And the idea is truly awesome.