When your lab is as big as the universe

Rating: 10/10 (4 July 2014)

HUGE SPOILERS This isn't a review so much as my explanation of the movie.
Something somewhere in the universe is performing experiments in intelligence. The alien something is probably a tool user but that might just be my tool using bias. It/they find a likely candidate species here on Earth and tweak it so it becomes a tool user.
Then a marker is placed on the moon. When the species, humans, can build tools advanced enough to reach the moon the marker is tuned on. It points much farther away, to Jupiter. To make the trip to that destination will take the most advanced tools and the most advanced tool users, thus self-selecting the best sample specimens. Astronauts.
Upon reaching their destination, the Jupiter monolith, it acts like the tip of a pipette reaching in to a beaker or petri dish. In this case the pipette is a wormhole (or pick your euphemism). Back in the lab its probably only been a few seconds since the initial planet seeding event. What do you do with the monkey once you have him? Well, we give them blocks, ropes, language glyphs, etc to use and food as a reward. You'll notice David is eating.
We also give animals mirrors to look at. We seem to consider it a sort of ultimate self-awareness test. Really it's probably just the ability to store enough data about your own physical actions, and compare that to observed external actions, to realize that the creature in the mirror couldn't possibly be another living member of your species. What if you could do better than a mirror? An instantaneous, beam-me-up-Scottie, copy. An electro-clone. Is the creature smart enough to know that this "other" is actually "self". Would that ability be considered a delusion by the experimenter?
David is shown a version of himself near death. How does the species understanding of mortality interact with it's "theory of other". How does that interact with the knowledge that this other is self?
The final image is a metaphor; The human species is a foetus waiting to be born into the larger cosmos.
To be sure we think of all of the above as science-fiction rather than fantasy or techno-fable, like Flash Gordon, the non-omnipotence of the experimenting intelligence is shown by it's flawed creation. Humans. The humans build flawed intelligence in the form of HAL, which malfunctions. (Who malfunctions?). Thus keeping godhead the always receding point just beyond the accumulations of science.