Ok, my thoughts :).

First of all, woah, trippy….

Anyway, I'll start with what I think. This is just based on discussion with a friend, no internet help or anything so hopefully it isn't too rubbish.

When I first watched it, I was incredible confused. It had been a great experience, but like, what..just…happened…. After a bit of discussion I realized it has a fairly understandable plot.

I'm fairly sure the film is about some sort of ascension, as in becoming a god-like being. The monolith exists to help beings achieve this (Maybe left behind by the original aliens who managed). At the beginning of the film, the monolith is surrounded by apes, and I think it "speaks" to them, since in the next shot an ape picks up a bone as a tool, an important evolutionary step. I think that the monolith planted that idea in it's head. The monolith then guides humanity to become space fairing types, who eventually discover the second clue, the monolith that sends a signal to Jupiter. Finally, that monolith is the key to reaching this god-like state, by testing you fancy tea drinking skills :D. Not quite sure about the fancy palace part, but I think the baby is the final stage, this sort of omnipotent fetus or something.

When it comes to HAL, I've got to feel somewhat sorry. From what I understand, he was mostly just trying to protect himself after his mistake of thinking the satellite would fail. I'm fairly sure he made the mistake, otherwise he wouldn't have tried to kill all the people on the ship (They would only disconnect him if he had made a mistake). But I do question how fair it is to want something that believes (or does) that it has emotions and consciousness to be correct 100% of the time, a human could never do that, and HAL is supposed to reproduce human like thoughts so it's a bit of a double standard :D.

What I'm wondering is whether HAL cared or not about the mission, as it could give further hints of the role of intelligence within the monolith. HAL says he's trying to protect the mission at one point, and since he has more knowledge than Dave of the missions true purpose, then it'd make sense that he was. However, the mission still requires people (Otherwise what would be the point of bringing any along), so by killing them all it jeopardizes it anyway. This makes me questions HALs sincerity along with if he knew the real mission at all anyway, especially since he questioned parts of the mission at the beginning. Not sure…

Anyway, that's my bit :D. I've definitely got a few questions which I'd love to hear ideas on though. Like, what happened when the monolith on the moon, "attacked?" the astronauts. What was that place that Dave ended up in? And do you think it's possible for an AI like HAL9000 to ever reach a similar state? Thanks if you participate, hopefully some of you have seen it haha :D.

I actually just watched it recently as well, for the first time. Thinking back on many other artistic creations I've seen dealing with space and otherworldly forces/entities the thing that stood out to me the most is how influential this movie was. Mostly though things like the design of the moon-lander ship with the red and blue lighting and the clean, white spaceship interiors, I've seen those design elements so many times in more modern stuff.

What I thought of HAL was that from his perspective he was fulfilling his programming perfectly. The satellite bit was actually NOT a mistake, he intentionally mis-diagnosed that in order to draw the astronauts out of the ship and hinder communications between them and the base. The only mistake he made was underestimating Dave's capability to get back on the ship. You do raise a good point that its a bit paradoxical for him to exhibit a form of human consciousness and yet believe that he is perfect, I've heard it said that imperfection is an integral part of human nature and I think thats true at least to some degree. I think if as an AI if he did possess any form of consciousness then perhaps his actions were due to a kind of immaturity, as in a lack of understanding of his own consciousness and that of others. He was after all only a few years old, and considering all that he did know and his capacity for knowledge I don't think it even occurred to him until the very end that there was this fundamental thing that he didn't understand.