And look at the convictions which underpin both works: that humans are intrinsically, self-destructively violent, and that anyone who believes himself to be 100% right is probably a dangerous maniac. It may be going too far to call 2001 a cynical political comedy, but if Kubrick hadn’t wanted us to laugh, he wouldn’t have focused on a “zero-gravity toilet”. And he wouldn’t have had a chapter entitled The Dawn of Man, in which man, having dawned, bashes another man’s brains out with a club.

Great apes

In this opening sequence, our hairy ancestors (played by mime artists in costumes) eat nothing but roots and berries until they happen upon a towering black slab which was once compared to a tombstone but which now brings to mind an oversized iPhone. This mysterious monolith accelerates the ape-men’s learning, and one of them has the idea to use a bone as a weapon. After he has killed both a tapir and a fellow ape-man, he flings the bone high into the air, and Kubrick brings us the edit which always pops up when you type “match cut” into a search engine: the spinning bone is replaced by a satellite orbiting the Earth. Except that it’s not a satellite, as such. According to Clarke, the craft which takes the place of the bone is “supposed to be an orbiting space bomb, a weapon in space”. Here, at least, we can see what Kubrick is getting at: by his reckoning, human progress has all been about developing bigger and better ways to murder each other.