Michael Jackson was not the only moonwalker commemorated this year; 2009 marked the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 9 mission that placed American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon.

Even as China and India are cautiously attempting space missions of their own now, that first moon landing marked in the world the height of a certain optimism in the notion of progress, a certain faith in the endeavours of science and human ingenuity, and our inherent ability to overcome challenges and transcend our limitations, a mindset that seems to have long receded from our common perspective.

It does not seem unfair to question that optimism when 40 years later diarrhea and malaria are still among the leading causes of death, a fact brought home to Nepalis by the epidemic in Jajarkot.

Next month Hollywood technicians will release restored footage from that landing, a cinematic landmark in its own right. So now might be the perfect time to revisit Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which began earlier in that decade as a collaboration with sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke and was released a year before the manned moon landing. Kubrick's masterpiece encapsulates the promises of human progress and highlights man's conflicted relationship with technology through a vision peppered with the anxieties of the Cold War and enlivened by curious notions of what the world might be like at the beginning of the 21st century.

The lynchpin of the sprawling, segmented 2001 is the image of a black monolith, a towering slab of black rock. It is alien, inscrutable and totemic, and stares back blankly at the humanity it encounters, first in the recesses of the past where it inspires an ape-like ancestor to kill using a tool, then thousands of years later at the end of the 20th century when a group of Americans uncover it on the moon, and finally on Jupiter's moon where the 'Odysseus' of the film, Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea), comes face to face with it while on a lonesome manned mission. It is a common complaint of canonical works, and cinematic ones such as 2001 are no exception, that they are inaccessible and obscure. Stanley Kubrick's 2001 may be guilty of the charge, but mostly because of its uncompromising vision.

Audiences today might find the central segment set on the pioneering spaceship, which details the contest between the human passengers and the onboard computer HAL, to be the most narratively coherent and satisfying. It is in this section, still rich in the kinds of serious questions that mark this film, where the innovative storytelling - its experimental use of sound and silence, for instance - is most effective. Indeed, even in its ambiguity (moral and narrative), there has rarely been a piece of cinema as gripping as the final confrontation between the surviving human and his homicidal computer.

Reconsidering 2001, one can't help but wonder at its curious contraction from the science fiction genre. Despite its audacious arc spanning thousands of years, the direction that it begins in is in the past, and it extends scant decades into the future. Nor does it, for the most part, venture outside the solar system. Even as its image of the future exceeds the accomplishment of today (we have no manned missions heading to other planets and no Soviet-American space stations outfitted like the lobbies of 5-star hotels), it remains oddly modest and prosaic. Kubrick and Clarke do not imagine a resolution to the Cold War, let alone even cosmetic changes to the race and gender politics of their time: American women serve as flight hostesses and receptionists and nary a person of color besmirches the screen. That aside, in the premium placed on 'realism', one finds a still entertaining attention to mechanics and the everyday tedium of life in zero gravity space, from magnetic shoes to meals drunk out of a straw. The state-of-the-art special effects of the time are still curiously effective.

What is most admirable and audacious about 2001 is its insistence on remaining agnostic towards its meanings, conferring on them a meditative aspect, even in moments of real terror or surrealism. What is the next stage in the evolution of man? Are we fundamentally a violent species and is transcendence beyond us? Does technology allow us to overcome our limitations or will it simply lead to our destruction? 2001 evokes these questions for the attentive viewer but does not allow for comfortable answers. The movie is iconic beyond doubt, and has attracted parody and homage in equal measure. But it also provides a template for a more sophisticated, contemplative and adult science fiction that has rarely been repeated in American cinema.

2001: A Space Odyssey
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Cast: Keir Dullea, William Sylvester, Gary Lockwood, Daniel Richter
Runtime: 2 hrs 39 mins
Release date: 1968