Stanley Kubrick directs Keir Dullea, Douglas Rain and William Sylvester in a sci-fi epic from the dawn of man via space travel to a final stage in technological evolution.

Kubrick’s finest work for many still frustratingly rubs me the wrong way. Impenetrable when I first watched it as a teenager, this fifth attempt to appreciate it, having recently read Arthur C. Clarke’s tandem released novella as a type of York Notes, merely made me feel the book was far superior. The SFX innovation to achieve the vision impresses and the HAL chapter is hauntingly well realised (“I can feel it”) but everything around that sequence, the majority of the film, is dull and alienating. Being a massive Stanley fan away from this and Eyes Wide Shut I’ll trust that alienation is the intention and the fault is with me. It can only be attributable to human error.

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