Kubrick won an Academy Award for these special effects. It was the surreal, abstract future. It was headache-inducing. Besides, as every young reader of Animal Farm knew, there was the equally impossible date of George Orwell's 1984 to live through first. But here we are.
Space is a metaphor for the collective psyche.
The imagery is necessarily physical and thus apparently of outer space. This four-part odyssey begins with the story of primordial apes who radically change from peaceful to violent when a mysterious black monolith appears near them, emitting strange vibrations. After a bloody skirmish, an ape hurls a bone into the air and it morphs into a spaceship. The tools of violence may look different, filmmaker Kubrick warns, but high technology is weaponry all the same. And through it all, there are images of round orbs, rotating spheres, moving circles and planets.