Painfully slow at times, fascinating and exciting at others  an intelligent sci-fi that looks great and is engaging despite having some weak aspects

Rating: Null/10 (3 January 2005)

A group of apes feed together as a tribe, fending off other apes. The discovery of a tall black monolith, the use of a weapon and the sending of a signal see us jump into the future where a mission is being sent to the moon. The mission is in response to the discovery of an unnatural monolith that had been deliberately buried under the surface. When the monolith emits a high pitch signal we jump 18 months forward to a mission on its way to Jupiter. Drs Bowman and Poole lead, with the rest of the crew in hibernation and the ship under the control of a HAL-9000 series computer. Things are strange enough with the mysterious nature of the mission but an apparent error in HAL creates more immediate worries.
If you will humour me for a moment I will state my interpretation of the plot before looking at the film. To me the set up is about evolution of man, here being either guided or monitored by an alien race for reasons we can only wonder about. Obviously the monoliths mark times where we have advanced to a point where we can go to the next step, with Bowman's eventual journey just being the next step in man's evolution. Now what HAL's malfunction has to do with this is beyond me, in fact I'd say that it is actually unrelated but is just a separate part of the same story. However this is not a problem because both parts of the story are full of interesting ideas and strands that more than fill what is, lets be honest, a rather slow and unnecessarily long film. The pace may infuriate modern, younger viewers who have come to this as "one of the greatest sci-fi's ever made" expecting it to be an Aliens or a Star Wars  it isn't, it is cold, remote, slow and built on ideas more than action.
The film does have several sections that could have been significantly trimmed or lost altogether and it is hard to see why some of them were there other than to fill out the running time (the bit about the rumour of "infection" on the moon could have been lost as we are told this much briefer in the meeting in the next scene; and the apes could have been shorter) and this is always a problem to me while those scenes are on. However, as an overall film it isn't a problem because the time does move surprisingly quickly considering how little happens at times  and it does this because it is relentlessly interesting. The evolution thread is never fully answered and, for that reason, is interesting throughout even if some viewers will baulk at the idea of being left to make their own conclusions and not having it all neatly explained for them. This makes up the beginning and end of the film, but the middle 80 minutes have little to do with it and instead are more about a view of the dangers inherent in a cold future where computers are given too much trust, credit and responsibility. Looking back, this view has only become more and more relevant and is now such a part of sci-fi that it is so easy to forget how influential this film has been. It is never fully explained why HAL goes (to quote the President in Strangelove) "a little funny" but it works the better for us not knowing  it feeds our mistrust of him as a computer because it could have been deliberate, accidental, pre-programmed or just his application of pure, cold logic to an situation that, because it involves humans, can never be seen in those terms. I won't ramble on, but it provides so much food for thought that it more than makes up for the very cold, stretched plot and running time.
Although it is easy to pick holes in it from our CGI-enhanced world, the film still looks great and, more than that is actually imaginative  something that CGI sometimes fails to be. Again there are probably too many long scenes of craft moving silently through space but generally they are interesting. The first cut form bone to ship to the Blue Danube is iconic and will be known even to those who have never seen the film; meanwhile the silence of space is well used. The Stargate scene is well known as a "trippy" scene but even straight it works and (despite being overlong and slightly dated) is imaginative and interesting. The cold mood continues with the direction as Kubrick uses a lot of very static shots to tell his story  without the style and interest brought out by the movement it is WHAT he looks at rather than how and he manages to frame all manner of interesting shots within the ideas in the script. Performances are very much secondary in this cold film but Dullea is suitably restrained even if part of me wanted him to be more human in the face of HAL. Douglas Rain only provides a voice but comes out as the single most memorable "actor" in the film as he plays HAL with cold, logical and unmeaning menace. Outside of these two nobody else really shines as they are never the focus, although it always amuses me to see Rossiter in there! Overall this is deservedly regarded as a classic and "must see" film. It is not a perfect film as it is overlong, is not edited as tightly as it could have been and does sometimes focus on visuals while leaving us to work out the substance ourselves, but these are minor complaints as the film is filled with imagination both visually and idea-wise. Its status and reputation mean it is a "must see" for cinema fans, it is just as well then, that it is a brilliant and intelligent "must see" to boot.