It is almost impossible to believe that Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction epic is 40 years old, when it remains so thematically daring and so technically perfect.
From ape to star-child, it plots the course of mankind through our flawed humanity, our ideology and our infinite inquisitiveness.
Ultimately, the viewer is confronted by a dizzying series of exquisitely crafted moments – a bone transformed mid-flight, two ships in a celestial dance to Strauss’s Blue Danube, a dying computer finding solace in a song from its childhood – and more questions than answers about exactly what Kubrick and co-writer Arthur C Clarke were attempting to achieve with this unimaginably ambitious work of art.