Epic

Rating: 10/10 (20 January 2010)

There is no other word for it. Any amount of hyperbole would simply be insulting. Hyperbole is what things like this are made for.
The film is a feat of visual effects that even in this day is frightening and spellbinding in how REAL it looks. Even the best CGI today can make something appear real, but it will ALWAYS just be on the very finest edge of artificiality. Virtually no part of this film ever slid through that edge. Every part appeared insanely real.
The prelude, "Dawn of Man" is itself a little film that brought me to tears with how amazingly, artfully done it is.
The sequence in which Heywood Floyd and the rest gaze upon the Monolith on the moon was one that kept me frozen stiff in fear and wonder like no other work of art has ever done.
Every single word spoken by HAL9000, coated in the thickest layers of smooth, deadpan articulation, is a horror of might and machine, and HAL's end is more heartwrenching and gutwrenching than most other movie death's for human characters.
The entire "postlude", Jupiter and beyond the infinite, was an all-out display of technology and wordless storytelling that seems at first to step into the realm of the "pretentious artsy indy film made by an arrogant art student", and then destroys any inclinations towards that notion, and becomes the very avatar that those pretentious art students aim to recreate with their seeming randomness of images and ideas.
I was in tears for so many portions of the film. Not from joy, not from sorrow, but from the sheer emotional power the film had that I have never seen from any film, book, play, television show, or game ever. Epic.