When, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick showed the oscillating chimp bone metamorphose into the starship Discovery One, it showed in one dazzling shot the entire million-year progress of humanity, from “promising mammal” to “intergalactic, borderline godlike being”.
But while one doesn’t want to take anything away from one of the most awe-inspiring moments in movie history, there is one way Kubrick could have pushed it. For, surely, the true pinnacle achievement of our species is to have progressed from bone-wielding ape to creatures who built spaceships and thence to spaceships with celebrities in them.
