Mature Science-Fiction

Rating: Null/10 (30 August 2012)

A landmark movie, but not perfect. Very tedious and slow moving and pedantically produced, Kubrick had a field day putting his "stamp" on this film.
Yes, he is a great producer/director, but too much film noir is apparent in this movie. He loves to "isolate" his characters in a kind of silent surreal "forum", and give the audience a sense of inexplicable foreboding (his style is the same in all the movies of his I've seen, The Shining, 2001, and Eyes wide shut). As for an explanation of this movie...WHAT'S NOT TO UNDERSTAND? The monolith represented the apple (I hate to get into religion here, but), so to speak.... that spark that changed forever mankind from mere animals, to self-conscious, intelligent beings.
It being on the moon at the dawn of our extraterrestrial baby-steps, meant that mankind was ready to be changed again (an evolutionary change), into something else, that we (at present) can not imagine (that being the case, the change could only be represented by the star child {the embryo}..."rebirth").
What puzzled me, and the thing I hated about this movie, however, was that there was TWO stories in it---the profound one about mankind's change, and a silly one about a computer terrorizing the crew. I did'nt see how they tied together, and it appeared just a ploy to make the movie more appealing to the masses, and give it more substance (it already had plenty, to me).
You could tell easily the movie was made in the psychedelic 60s....Kubrick must have really been caught up in times himself, as we see in the 30 minute "acrylics kaleidascope" scene.
So, some of the movie is really transparent, but since so much also was unprecedented in film-making, that it will forever stand out as a landmark classic.