The best movie in cinematic history? Hardly. I have always had a problem with this film’s ending — which makes absolutely no sense at all — and why HAL would want to murder the crew in the first place. Both of these elements of the film are not adequately addressed or resolved.

It was never adequately explained what went wrong with HAL that he wanted to murder the entire crew. What was he going to do when he got to Jupiter? He has no physical body to leave the ship, so what was he going to do when he got there? Even if it was a malfunction in his “reason” circuits, why was this never addressed and pointed out as the plot went along? All that the two crewmen intimated was that they thought HAL was malfunctioning, but they never addressed or resolved exactly what it was in HAL’s circuitry that was going wrong. They left it up in the air and unresolved.

The ending was ridiculous and made absolutely no sense at all and looks as though it was lifted from an entirely different movie. What did it all mean? The “star” trails that streak by inside the black monolith in orbit around Jupiter, the strange psychedelic lights whizzing by as Bowman flies over some weird landscape, Bowman in his spacesuit entering the dining room seeing himself as an old man, Bowman on his death bed and finally Bowman as an embryo floating in space. It all seems to be so odd and disjointed from the rest of the movie that was so realistic and of the “hard” science fiction genre in tone and plot. The ending, on the other hand, was so abstract and “Twilight Zone-esque” that it really doesn’t fit. From all I have read and seen about this vague, open-ended ending of the movie, the filmmakers (Kubrick and Clarke) deliberately left the ending unresolved. To me, this is a major cop-out. Why make a movie where you leave the ending to be a mish-mash that makes no specific point? In the end, the movie says NOTHING. It leaves it to the viewer to fill in an ending that he THINKS it was about. No, this movie falls apart in the end and all that beautiful mystery leading up to the climax, falls apart and falls flat. A totally dissatisfying way to end an otherwise interesting movie.