I do believe the monolith is a symbol of advancement or perhaps a warning for or from the future. Kind of fitting when you think of how much advancement has happened in deep learning in such a short amount of time and how much power a few organizations could end up with when they understand more about how to wield it. Either humanity is going in the right direction and we'll experience the advancement distributed fairly amongst us all or we'll follow history's footsteps and abuse the monolith's power for all the technology we can squeeze from it. There is also the chance of us becoming the monolith.
As for the movie, it looks like Max Cady held his breath and ended up on a stranded island. The title does elude me though.