Highly atmospheric classic

Rating: Null/10 (24 February 2006)

What a great film. Few movies come as close to this for atmosphere. Kubrick manages to provide an excellent story played out over 2 and a half hours of superb screenplay. The real highlight is the score, a series of classical pieces, including Strauss. The many moral or ethical questions posed by the film are open to debate and I will not walk too far down the path of amateur psychologist. All I will say is, I think the film was about man's conflict with technology and all the issues that entails. Hal, the demented computer, is brilliant. Chilling and distant, Hal is an ideal 'baddy'. The film is not one for those with short attention spans with long sequences of no speech and often silence. It's great stuff though. The central plot concerns a mission in space which promises to find out startling new things about the universe: Hal's job is to safeguard the mission, even from the crew themselves. This is where the conflict originates. The crew question Hal's sanity and decide to switch him down. In a highly chilling scene, however, he lipreads the plotters intentions and takes 'suitable' action to stop them. The struggles between the last surviving crew member and Hal are highly entertaining and tension-packed. For such an old film, this looks good as well. The apes at the start are clearly there to provide the most imaginative scene-leap ever. 8/10.