The greatest film of all time!

Rating: 10/10 (15 April 2008)

Is 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY about anything? Is it about nothing? Is it about everything? This is the joy of this masterpiece. Who knows? Who cares? It has no real plot, no real storyline to follow, no characters to get into (save for one that I will mention later). Personally, I think it's about man's miniscule existence in a completely awesome, unknown universe. The fact is: we DON'T know what is out there and probably never will. This is what makes this film the best sci-fi experience in all of history. It captures the essence of space travel as it really is w/o ever being a boring film to watch. The ambiguous ending only adds to the allure of the film and makes one ponder, wonder, and dream. Tracking man's journey from its evolutionary origins and fast-forwarding to the year 2001 in the age of space travel and moon landings, the film is a testament to man's capacity to think, absorb, learn, understand (or at least try to) and explore a vast and ever-changing universe.
As stated, the film starts millions of years ago to the time when apes were learning how to hunt, kill, eat, and seek shelter to survive the vast earth, then jump-cuts (perhaps the most famous cut in all of film history) to the year 2001 and man roaming the universe in search of other life forms. This cut on the surface is about the evolution of man, but it is symbolic of how the humans of the future still were still learning and exploring just like the apes of the past. Evolution never stops.
The 2001 humans find a mysterious monolith buried on the moon during an excavation (the apes of the past also encountered a similar monolith). They send a group of astronauts on a fact-finding mission to Jupiter to learn of its origins and what it all means. The astronauts are led by Dr. Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Dr. Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood). The Jupiter spaceship is controlled by an advanced, thinking, supercomputer with the acronym HAL-9000, and HAL-9000 is that 'character' that I mentioned before. HAL (a machine!) is the only character that we can relate to. HAL is supersmart, but very self-serving and diabolical, as a malfunctioning system threatens its very existence. So HAL schemes and plots against his astronaut companions to sabotage the mission. These sequences are among the most memorable in film history as the astronauts must outsmart HAL in order to survive and complete the mission.
Bowman does survive and journeys through some kind of a black hole or wormhole to seemingly another vast part of the galaxy. This sequence still fascinates to this day. During travel, Bowman mysteriously ages quickly and then is actually re-born and the cycle starts over for him. Ambiguity has never been so fascinating! I just think that 2001 is the greatest film ever b/c of the fact that it doesn't have characters to love or hate and is about something more than just what most movies are about. The film never disappoints, as even the most acclaimed movies sometimes do.