Movie Review: '2010: The Year We Make Contact'
Pros: 2010's cast, including Roy
Scheider and Helen Mirren. Good script. Great visuals.
Cons: Real life rendered its Cold War political
undertones obsolete.
In the years after the 1968 release of Stanley Kubrick's
landmark science-fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey, he and
collaborator Arthur C. Clarke were asked many questions about how it was
conceived, how the realistic special effects had been done, why
did Kubrick decide to use classical music pieces in the soundtrack, and if
HAL was a punny jab at IBM's corporate name.
Another question that followed both the director and the writer for years was Will you ever do a follow-up to 2001?
Kubrick, of course, wasn't interested in doing a sequel and generally stayed away from science fiction; the only other set-in-the-future projects he ever envisioned after 2001 were A Clockwork Orange and penning the basic story idea for A.I., and even that he turned over to his friend Steven Spielberg a few years before his death in 1999.
Clarke, on the other hand, at first demurred from doing a literary sequel, but in 1982 his novel 2010: Odyssey Two was published and sold well enough that two other sequels, 2061: Odyssey Three and 3001: The Final Odyssey followed.
Of course, MGM - the studio which had released 2001 14 years earlier - was interested in a screen adaptation and even approached Kubrick to see if he wanted to direct 2010. He declined, but he was gracious to writer-director Peter Hyams (Capricorn One), telling him he didn't mind if Hyams helmed the follow-up to one of his best-known works.
The Film:
As is often the case when a novel is adapted into a screenplay, Hyams slims 2010's story to its bare essentials by jettisoning huge sections of Clarke's book, including a subplot involving a disastrous landing on Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, by a Chinese spacecraft.
Knowing full well that 2010 had to be both a sequel to Kubrick's film and yet stand on its own as a 1980s-era audience draw, Hyams starts the film with the same Thus Spake Zarathustra (Theme from 2001) title music and a recap of the story of USS Discovery's encounter with the huge monolith in orbit over Jupiter. This is done quickly and as economically as possible so we can move on to the "present" of 2010.
Hyams then takes us to the Very Large Array of radio-telescopes out in the New Mexico desert. There, Dr. Heywood Floyd (Roy Scheider) has a semi-clandestine meeting with Soviet scientist Dimitri Moisevitch (Dana Elcar).
Moisevitch informs Floyd, the former chairman of the National Council of Astronautics and the man in charge of the ill-fated Discovery mission to Jupiter, that the now-derelict spacecraft is danger of being pulled out of its orbit (now between the gas giant and its volcanic moon Io).
The Americans, Moisevitch tells Floyd, are preparing Discovery II and its crew for a salvage mission which will shed light into why HAL-9000 had its famous failure and other mysteries, but the Soviets have a ship, the Alexei Leonov, ready to go.
But because Discovery is American territory at a time when the Cold War is threatening to become hot, Moisevitch proposes a Solomonic solution - a joint Soviet-American flight to Jupiter...if the two governments can agree.
Floyd, who is now a university chancellor and happily re-married with a much younger scientist (Madolyn Smith), is somewhat skeptical at first, but he somehow gets approval from a very conservative White House to go ahead with this joint mission.
Over the next few months, Floyd tries to assure his wife and young son that this is going to be his last spaceflight and spends much of his time either getting in shape for the mission or putting together the American half of the Leonov's crew. He recruits the brilliant engineer Walter Curnow (John Lithgow) who helped design Discovery, and computer systems creator Dr. Chandra (Bob Balaban), the man who programmed the 9000-series of supercomputers - in essence, HAL's human "father."
Along with Leonov's Soviet contingent (played by Helen Mirren, Elya Bashkin, Oleg Rudnik, Victor Steinbach, Saveli Kramarov, Vladimir Skomarovsky and Natasha Shneider), the three Americans go forth to Jupiter, "sleeping" in hibernation and blissfully unaware that a crisis in Central America is turning into a war between their two nations.
What happens once the Leonov reaches Jupiter I'll cheerfully leave to the reader to discover, but two of the actors from Kubrick's film (Keir Dullea and Douglas Rain) return to reprise their roles, and Arthur C. Clarke makes not one but two cameos. (He's easy to spot in the first one, but the second one is subtle and you have to look very closely for it.)
Critiquing 2010:
Considering that Hyams made the film at a time when science fiction movies tried to imitate Star Wars, Alien and Star Trek by focusing on space battles, unfriendly space lifeforms, or "space opera" conventions, 2010 is a rarity of the genre.
Instead of going for megabucks by giving teenage guys and college-age geeks the usual laser guns and faster-than-light starships in dogfights, Hyams does a good job at compromising between Kubrick's high-concept vision of the future based on what tech could be like in the 21st Century and a 1980s film's quicker pacing.
Clearly, jettisonning the Chinese spacecraft's doomed Europa landing helps Hyams cut down on pacing and lets the viewer focus on the somewhat complex issues that remain - including the thorny problem of what might happen if the Leonov crew makes it to Discovery and reawakens HAL-9000.
The cast, which includes many Soviet expatriates (Bashkin being perhaps the best known, since his career includes memorable appearances in Air Force One, Thirteen Days and two of the Spider-Man features), is great. Mirren is excellent as Mission Commander Tanya Kirbuk, and Scheider does a good job at stepping into a role created by another actor 16 years before.
Also still stunning - particularly in a digitally cleared up version - are the special effects. Though not created by Industrial Light and Magic, the most famous effects company in Hollywood, the stunning visuals were done by three different companies which did have several Star Wars artists in their payroll. The most stunning sequences, which are set near Jupiter, still stand up to even the closest scrutiny almost 30 years after the film's release.
Unfortunately, while the sci-fi elements still work and the acting, pacing and effects are top-notch, 2010 has become badly dated because history failed to unfold as novelist Clarke and writer-director Hyams envisioned.
Between 1984 and the real 21st Century, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the Cold War officially ended, rendering moot the political undertones of the film. (The novel pretty much assumed the Cold War had ended, but as in 2001, the two superpowers still had separate and competing space programs) Yes, it's true that the Russian Republic under Vladimir Putin and his "successor" is once again flexing its muscle and challenging American/Western foreign policy in order to recover some sort of superpower status, but it's highly unlikely that we are in for a Cold War II that resembles the situation in 2010.
To his credit, Hyams strikes a careful balance between wanting to play respectful homages to the first film and making his own memorable movie. He strives - not always successfully - to capture the look of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey but doesn't try to do a carbon copy. This includes his choice to only use the Theme from 2001 in the soundtrack; instead of using different classical music compositions as Kubrick had done in '68, Hyams hired David Shire (Zodiac) to write an original score for 2010.
Though it did not become a classic as its more famous predecessor, 2010 is still an enjoyable - if rather dated - vision of what is now "our time" as imagined in 1984. It doesn't quite reach the lofty heights of Kubrick's 2001, but it boldly attempts to go beyond the Star Wars/Star Trek conventions of space-related movies and, at the same time, gives audiences something to wonder about after the credits roll and the film fades to black.
Another question that followed both the director and the writer for years was Will you ever do a follow-up to 2001?
Kubrick, of course, wasn't interested in doing a sequel and generally stayed away from science fiction; the only other set-in-the-future projects he ever envisioned after 2001 were A Clockwork Orange and penning the basic story idea for A.I., and even that he turned over to his friend Steven Spielberg a few years before his death in 1999.
Clarke, on the other hand, at first demurred from doing a literary sequel, but in 1982 his novel 2010: Odyssey Two was published and sold well enough that two other sequels, 2061: Odyssey Three and 3001: The Final Odyssey followed.
Of course, MGM - the studio which had released 2001 14 years earlier - was interested in a screen adaptation and even approached Kubrick to see if he wanted to direct 2010. He declined, but he was gracious to writer-director Peter Hyams (Capricorn One), telling him he didn't mind if Hyams helmed the follow-up to one of his best-known works.
The Film:
As is often the case when a novel is adapted into a screenplay, Hyams slims 2010's story to its bare essentials by jettisoning huge sections of Clarke's book, including a subplot involving a disastrous landing on Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, by a Chinese spacecraft.
Knowing full well that 2010 had to be both a sequel to Kubrick's film and yet stand on its own as a 1980s-era audience draw, Hyams starts the film with the same Thus Spake Zarathustra (Theme from 2001) title music and a recap of the story of USS Discovery's encounter with the huge monolith in orbit over Jupiter. This is done quickly and as economically as possible so we can move on to the "present" of 2010.
Hyams then takes us to the Very Large Array of radio-telescopes out in the New Mexico desert. There, Dr. Heywood Floyd (Roy Scheider) has a semi-clandestine meeting with Soviet scientist Dimitri Moisevitch (Dana Elcar).
Moisevitch informs Floyd, the former chairman of the National Council of Astronautics and the man in charge of the ill-fated Discovery mission to Jupiter, that the now-derelict spacecraft is danger of being pulled out of its orbit (now between the gas giant and its volcanic moon Io).
The Americans, Moisevitch tells Floyd, are preparing Discovery II and its crew for a salvage mission which will shed light into why HAL-9000 had its famous failure and other mysteries, but the Soviets have a ship, the Alexei Leonov, ready to go.
But because Discovery is American territory at a time when the Cold War is threatening to become hot, Moisevitch proposes a Solomonic solution - a joint Soviet-American flight to Jupiter...if the two governments can agree.
Floyd, who is now a university chancellor and happily re-married with a much younger scientist (Madolyn Smith), is somewhat skeptical at first, but he somehow gets approval from a very conservative White House to go ahead with this joint mission.
Over the next few months, Floyd tries to assure his wife and young son that this is going to be his last spaceflight and spends much of his time either getting in shape for the mission or putting together the American half of the Leonov's crew. He recruits the brilliant engineer Walter Curnow (John Lithgow) who helped design Discovery, and computer systems creator Dr. Chandra (Bob Balaban), the man who programmed the 9000-series of supercomputers - in essence, HAL's human "father."
Along with Leonov's Soviet contingent (played by Helen Mirren, Elya Bashkin, Oleg Rudnik, Victor Steinbach, Saveli Kramarov, Vladimir Skomarovsky and Natasha Shneider), the three Americans go forth to Jupiter, "sleeping" in hibernation and blissfully unaware that a crisis in Central America is turning into a war between their two nations.
What happens once the Leonov reaches Jupiter I'll cheerfully leave to the reader to discover, but two of the actors from Kubrick's film (Keir Dullea and Douglas Rain) return to reprise their roles, and Arthur C. Clarke makes not one but two cameos. (He's easy to spot in the first one, but the second one is subtle and you have to look very closely for it.)
Critiquing 2010:
Considering that Hyams made the film at a time when science fiction movies tried to imitate Star Wars, Alien and Star Trek by focusing on space battles, unfriendly space lifeforms, or "space opera" conventions, 2010 is a rarity of the genre.
Instead of going for megabucks by giving teenage guys and college-age geeks the usual laser guns and faster-than-light starships in dogfights, Hyams does a good job at compromising between Kubrick's high-concept vision of the future based on what tech could be like in the 21st Century and a 1980s film's quicker pacing.
Clearly, jettisonning the Chinese spacecraft's doomed Europa landing helps Hyams cut down on pacing and lets the viewer focus on the somewhat complex issues that remain - including the thorny problem of what might happen if the Leonov crew makes it to Discovery and reawakens HAL-9000.
The cast, which includes many Soviet expatriates (Bashkin being perhaps the best known, since his career includes memorable appearances in Air Force One, Thirteen Days and two of the Spider-Man features), is great. Mirren is excellent as Mission Commander Tanya Kirbuk, and Scheider does a good job at stepping into a role created by another actor 16 years before.
Also still stunning - particularly in a digitally cleared up version - are the special effects. Though not created by Industrial Light and Magic, the most famous effects company in Hollywood, the stunning visuals were done by three different companies which did have several Star Wars artists in their payroll. The most stunning sequences, which are set near Jupiter, still stand up to even the closest scrutiny almost 30 years after the film's release.
Unfortunately, while the sci-fi elements still work and the acting, pacing and effects are top-notch, 2010 has become badly dated because history failed to unfold as novelist Clarke and writer-director Hyams envisioned.
Between 1984 and the real 21st Century, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the Cold War officially ended, rendering moot the political undertones of the film. (The novel pretty much assumed the Cold War had ended, but as in 2001, the two superpowers still had separate and competing space programs) Yes, it's true that the Russian Republic under Vladimir Putin and his "successor" is once again flexing its muscle and challenging American/Western foreign policy in order to recover some sort of superpower status, but it's highly unlikely that we are in for a Cold War II that resembles the situation in 2010.
To his credit, Hyams strikes a careful balance between wanting to play respectful homages to the first film and making his own memorable movie. He strives - not always successfully - to capture the look of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey but doesn't try to do a carbon copy. This includes his choice to only use the Theme from 2001 in the soundtrack; instead of using different classical music compositions as Kubrick had done in '68, Hyams hired David Shire (Zodiac) to write an original score for 2010.
Though it did not become a classic as its more famous predecessor, 2010 is still an enjoyable - if rather dated - vision of what is now "our time" as imagined in 1984. It doesn't quite reach the lofty heights of Kubrick's 2001, but it boldly attempts to go beyond the Star Wars/Star Trek conventions of space-related movies and, at the same time, gives audiences something to wonder about after the credits roll and the film fades to black.
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