A film that needs repeated viewing

Rating: 10/10 (23 June 2008)

2001: A Space Odyssey is a classic sci-fi film, an example of Stanley Kubrick's genius as a director. I admit I didn't like it as much as other Kubrick films at first, but another viewing made me see what a brilliant film it was.
The film is very complex and tackles a number of themes, such as science and space travel, evolution, religion, discovery, the future of computing and alien life-forms. I personally think it is about man's yearning for discovery and wanting to improve themselves.
The film starts off at the dawn of man we look at a small of apes struggling to survive. They are forced away from their waterhole and were on the brink. It was only when the apes use bones as tools that the they are able to reclaim there waterhole, but become murderous and warlike. After that the film skips forward to the future and we see that man has been very advance, starting to make large space bases and colonising the moon. A team of scientist discovery a strange black monolith on the moon and start to study it. It is then skips future another 18 months and the film focuses on a mission to Jupiter and we look at two astronauts, Frank and Dave, and the computer HAL. The mission seems to be going smoothly enough until HAL makes an error and the crew decides to disconnect him. HAL however knows what they plan to do and takes drastic action to stop this, including murder. Its was Dave that was only able to stop him. After this we knew see Dave go through a wormhole around Jupiter and the film becomes very surreal.
This film is multi layered and many fans of this film have discussed what it means. I have given my opinion earlier. This film gets the science right and from a technical viewpoint, very impressive. The music is classical and very memorially and fitting for this film. There are also a lot of memorially scenes which have been homaged and parody a number of times. I personally really like the scene when Dave is disconnecting HAL and HAL is pleading for his life.
This is a film that needs to be watched a number of times.