This is the 1968 sci-fi film made by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur Clarke, famous for its pioneering depiction of technology, artificial intelligence, anthropology and human evolution etc. The supercomputer HAL 9000 is a famous figure of AI, which possess not just strong computational power, but also human-like emotions.
The story is centered around a sentinel rock found on Moon, which sent signal to Jupiter. A mission group is sent from early to investigate the signal destination on Jupiter. Of the crew of 5 humans and HAL, only HAL knew this true purpose. HAL killed 4 crew members in fear that they would shut him down and interfere with the trip mission. One crew survived, shut down HAL, and arrived at the Jupiter.
In my opinion, the 1968 movie is superb in its whimsical sense of sci-fi thoughts. The scenes setup both internally inside spacecraft and externally in the universe are still convincing today. But lack of dialogue and slow pace of storyline may not be liked by some people.
There are 4 episodes of the Space Odyssey series, published as 4 books. The first 2 were made into movies in 1968 (2001 A Space Odyssey) and 1984 (2010 Space Odyssey II). The later two are set in years 2061 and 3001. The 1968 movie is regarded as among the best movies in history. Before these 4 books, Clarke published a short story "The Sentinel" (PDF) in 1951, which he later expanded into the "2001 A Space Odyssey" in 1964, and further rewritten as a movie.
Arthur Clarke's books on the Space Odyssey series can be found here.
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