I literally just finished watching this film. It's hailed to be a true work of art, all deep and philosophical and meaningful and crap. It seemed relatively straightforward in the middle, but towards the end...

I'm just sat here and more or less the only thing on my mind is "What in the name of all that is holy did I just watch?"

Warning, this blog will contain spoilers, but frankly it's such an old film that those of you who haven't already seen it aren't the kind of people who would find it interesting.

So the film starts off with a bunch of monkeys on the brink of starvation. They're in this great barren desert and picking these tiny leaves and stuff for food. Also they're surrounded by tapirs, as one would expect. Y'know, why not?

Anyway, then another bunch of monkeys comes along and they scream at each other for about 5 minutes, then the second bunch of monkeys goes away again. Pretty eventful.

Then the monkeys wake up one day and there's a big cuboid standing in the middle of their nest. They freak out and start screaming for a bit, then they all go quiet and start huddling up to the thing, which is kinda weird, but meh, they're monkeys.

Then they start getting intelligent. This is symbolised by one monkey bashing a skeleton to bits with a bone, and then slaughtering tapirs. All the monkeys gorge on tapir flesh.
Then the other group of monkeys come along, and they beat them to death with bones.

Then they wake up on the third day and it's gone, just as mysteriously as it appeared. Sadface.

Then it skips forward to like, 2000, and there's this scientist in a spaceship headed towards the moon. He has a quick chat with a bunch of English folk about some space-virus or some crap like that.

Then he goes to a meeting of space-science-people, where they reveal in an epic plot twist that the rumours of space-virus things are actually just a cover story! I never saw it coming.

Anyway, turns out the reason they shut down this moon-base wasn't because of space-virus stuff, but because they found another one of those slab thingies, like the one that made the monkeys smart and ultimately evolve into humans. Of course, they were just monkeys back then, so they didn't recognise it.

So the scientist goes to see the crater where they dug up this slab thing, and then all the astronauts start looking at it all mysteriously. Then the sunlight hits it for the first time in god only knows how long, and it emits a really powerful radio pulse.

It skips to 18 months later, and there's a bunch of astronauts on a spaceship. The main astronaut runs around for a bit, and then draws some men while they're sleeping. Seems like a pretty normal guy.

Then he shows his drawings to HAL, the artificial intelligence which controls the ship. Artificial intelligences who control ships. Wonder what could possibly happen from this? Anyway, his drawings are OK, but I could totally do better. They're mostly just line-drawings with a little bit of cursory shading thrown in there. HAL thinks they're good, so he obviously has low standards. I think I know a little bit more about art than a super-smart artificial intelligence.

So anyway, HAL compliments the guy, whose name turns out to be Dave, on his rather crappy drawings.

Then he says "Oh, I think this thing is going to malfunction in about 72 hours." And HAL has never been wrong, so they check it, but there turns out to be nothing wrong with it. So they're like "OK then, we'll leave it in and see what goes wrong with it so we know how to fix it."

However, the two astronauts have this little discussion outside of HAL's hearing, and they talk about having to shut down HAL if it turned out that he was mistaken about the faulty part.

But, unbeknownst to them, HAL can lip-read, and he sees what they say, and he gets angry. So while one of the astronauts is out in space fixing stuff, he shoves him away from the ship with the pod and he goes flying off into space. The other astronaut uses another pod to rescue him and bring him back.

But then HAL doesn't let him back in!

Yeah, turns out he was pretty mad that they were planning to shut him down, so he decided to lock them out. Dave manages to break in through the emergency air-lock, despite having no helmet, although he loses his partner in the process, who goes flying off into space again.

Once he gets back in, HAL starts acting all heartbroken and apologetic, and insists that he's really very sorry about the whole "Trying to murder you" thing, and he's really feeling a lot better now.

Obviously, Dave's having none of that crap, so he goes into HAL's main CPU thingy and takes out his memory thingies. Then he goes loopy and starts singing "Daisy, Daisy," until his voice dies out.

It's now about 3/4 of the way through the roughly 2 1/4 hour film.
"But it seems as though the plot is almost over, how could you possibly have anything else to cram in?" I hear you say!
"How did he hear me say that?!" I hear you proclaim.
I have my ways.

So after he deactivates HAL, a pre-recorded message plays, telling him the true purpose of the odyssey. Turns out that slab on the moon sent a radio signal to nearby Jupiter, and they wanted to find out what it was signalling.

So Dave gets back into the cockpit (hehe, 'cockpit' and looks out the window. Turns out there's a gigantic slab thing just randomly floating around nearby Jupiter.

Now this is the point where he gets sucked into it.

Then there's about 15 minutes solid of what seems like a really bad media student trying to recreate the Doctor-Who intro while really, really high.
Loads of weird swirling patterns, landscapes with inverted colours, and all the while the occasional flash of Dave's face in an odd combination of pain and terror.

And then he dies and transforms into a gigantic glowing baby.

The end.