Fantastic

Rating: 10/10 (2 September 2018)

There's not much else that needs to be said about this film, it's been talked about for decades, but I decided my opinions might as well end up somewhere on this website.
Cinematography: Beautiful and gripping all the way through. You can almost see through how old it is by looking at the wonderful framing and colors in every shot. They all seem very planned, no shot in the film looked particularly bad. There were a few gripes with the special effects: the first being the tiger at the beginning. I noticed that whenever there was a spaceship in frame with another object, the perspective seemed a little bit off from where it was supposed to be. Finally, when showing a spaceship and then showing people inside the spaceship, you could tell that the people behind the window were filmed in a separate shot, because it was often shaky compared to its surroundings.
Sound Design: The sound is one of the things that really sells the atmosphere of the film. The soundtrack is a classic, everybody's heard it. In contrast to other films, the music wasn't used to make a suspenseful scene more suspenseful, it was to give the most important, human-focused scenes of the film a sense of importance, like in the LSD sequence at the end, and the weapon scene at the beginning. The sound design is what made the scene where Dave was disabling Hal extremely special, as well as amplifying the scenes characterized by the sound of breathing. Cutting between the rattling of the pods / space station and the silence of space was a genius choice. The chorus of male voices when characters approached the monolith was also a highly interesting sound.
Acting: The only thing that really held the film back was the missed opportunities in a few scenes. Not having the actors do anything intense added to the almost hypnosis of the film and stayed consistent with the theme, but it was also strange for one astronaut to see his friend being hurdled out of the pod into deep space and hardly reacting. I excused the very low-profile acting in most cases, because it fit the politician/scientist/astronaut role very well, but if you compare that to a film like Interstellar, where the actors have realistic reactions to scary things, Dave seemed apathetic to Frank being ejected from his pod, which confused me, I was expecting more. For most of the film, the acting was pretty good but not special, which makes sense because the story didn't require it to be anything insane. However, Dave's re-entry into the ship up until he finally dismantled Hal was very well acted.
Writing: You can probably guess most of my opinions about the writing. For any film to have as many possible interpretations as this one has, that's spectacular. To be able to write something that people can't settle on one interpretation of for fifty years, that's profound.
Overall, this film is easily a 10 out of 10, and it is the best portrayal of the human condition in film that I have ever seen, heavily inspiring the movie Interstellar in that regard. Bravo, Stanley Kubrick. Bravo.