The Great God Gun

On first seeing this movie at about age 65 I was totally UNDERwhelmed by the laborious detail of American "space candy", knowing how Kubrick despised such matters, SO I was taken back to 1961 doing my final High School exam in English [subject] in Australia and the Essay The Great God Gun, but try as I may to Google it I got nowhere.

But just now I finally managed to find it here

The academics who decided how to "learn us culture" back in 1961 had found a collection of essays but had decided that most were in fact not Essays but Articles, so the exam paper question we were primed all year to answer said:

1.  The "Collection of Essays" contains many entries that might be better classified as Articles.  Discuss, giving examples, the difference between the two literary forms.

We were primed as to best example of an Essay being The Great God Gun, and as you read it you will see why I had the flashback when watching this movie, reinforced by the general opinion in forums that the great majority of "sheeple" [or Ultimate Men] did NOT see any deeper meaning than the "basic" Clarke [Darwin ascribed] version of "dumb ape gets smart and becomes man and man goes to Jupiter".

But I had not remembered [after 50 years] that the author had continually reverted back to the comparison to "the savage", so having just now read the Essay again I am even more firmly convinced that this is where Kubrick got his inspiration to put this movie together in the way he did, with two DISTINCT "sides of the fence".  I see this as an example of the same style Kubrick uses to invite ridicule of his apes but at same time agreeing with Nietzsche that the DUMB one is man.

"The savage, we are told, is misguided enough to "bow down to wood and stone." Poor savage! If we could only take him, with his childlike intelligence, into our temple to see the god that the genius and industry of civilised man has created, a god so vast that a hundred men could not lift him, of such incredible delicacy that his myriad parts are fitted together to the thousandth, the ten-thousandth, and even the hundred-thousandth of an inch, and out of whose throat there issue thunders and lightnings that carry ruin for tens of miles—how ashamed the poor savage would be of his idols of wood and stone! How he would abase himself before the god of the Christian nations!"