I think I’m going to find reviewing this film quite difficult because it was extremely confusing! I know that it’s very famous and is supposed to be really brilliant, but unfortunately I just found the majority of it to be very boring. It spread out over almost three hours but could have been done in one, the scenes were so long! There was no dialogue until 30 minutes into the film, but what little talking there was was really good. In fact, I really, really enjoyed the dialogue parts and action parts, but I found the rest of it to be very dull and slow.
I can’t even really explain the plot of this film as it confused me so much! But I’ll try. It started at the dawn of time, with some apes (our ancestors) finding a huge black monolith sticking up out of the ground. Immediately after finding it, they learnt to use tools, and to kill and eat each other with them. It was kind of weird. Then, skipping many thousands of years later, a team of astronauts are being sent into space to investigate the discovery of an object on the Moon (and buried manually 4 million years earlier – proof that there must have been some form of intelligent live on the Moon then, if not now).
There’s a robot on board the spaceship named Hal, who is responsible for making sure everything runs smoothly and nothing goes well. He can talk, so the astronauts do communicate with him sometimes. After the astronauts become suspicious of Hal and how far his capabilities really extend, they conspire to disconnect him and make the journey on their own. However, Hal finds about this and indirectly kills one of the astronauts in his wrath.
Then… forget the Moon. We’re on the way to Jupiter now. And there are colours everywhere – colours shooting out of space and making the only remaining astronaut’s eyes turn multicoloured! (I’m just as confused as you are.) But it gets weirder! The astronaut, whose name was Dave, suddenly appeared in this palace bedroom, and he had aged about thirty years. He was looking into a room in which another version of himself, at age about seventy, was sitting eating dinner. That Dave – the one eating – turned suddenly and saw an even older Dave lying in bed as though he were on his deathbed; the dying Dave looked up and saw the huge black monolith, then he turned into an enormous, proportionally incorrect baby, appeared in outer space, stared at Planet Earth for a little bit, and then the film ended.
I was so confused! At the same time, though, I did really enjoy the dialogue parts, the parts with Hal involved, and that end scene in the palace with all the different versions of Dave (though I have no idea what it all meant). However, so much of this film was incredibly boring and made absolutely no sense, so I’d have to give it… 2.8 stars out of 5.
