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2010: The Year We Make Contact
(1984)
Review by Earl
Green
Dr. Heywood Floyd, the mission director of the Discovery
mission, resigned after the ambiguous conclusion of that flight, a scapegoat
for the U.S. government and the press to blame for the disastrous outcome.
The Soviet Union offers Floyd a berth on a Jupiter-bound Soviet mission
which will get to the derelict Discovery long before an American
follow-up mission can be launched. Despite a precarious political standoff
taking place between the two superpowers, Floyd talks the U.S. government
into allowing him to go on the Soviet flight along with two other Americans
- Walter Curnow, the Discovery's original designer, and Dr. Chandra,
the eccentric computer genius who created the HAL 9000 computer.
The Russian spacecraft Leonov arrives in Jupiter's vicinity three
years after leaving Earth, and Dr. Floyd is awakened from cryogenic hibernation
prematurely by captain of the Leonov, Commander Kirblik. The Leonov's
instruments have detected unusual chemical reactions occuring on the icy
Jovian moon of Europa, and a remote-controlled probe is launched to investigate.
The probe is destroyed by an unknown force, but not before it detects chlorophyll,
a necessary component of plant life. Upon reaching Jupiter's volcanic moon
Io, Curnow and cosmonaut Bralovsky spacewalk from the Leonov to
the Discovery, finding no trace of missing astronauts Bowman or
Poole. Reactivating Discovery's power systems, Curnow gets control
of the older spacecraft and follows the Leonov away from the orbit
of Io. Chandra manages to restore HAL, and the mission is now underway.
The two ships reach the enormous monolith, and very strange things begin
happening. Two important discoveries are made: the true motive behind HAL's
murderous behavior, and Earth's solar system is about to change...forever.
As flawed as this movie is - and I'm not even counting the very dated
Cold War subplot as one of its flaws - it makes a nice counterpart to 2001.
For all of the earlier movie's clinical coldness, 2010 is full of
tension, emotion and mystery - a somewhat more accessible mystery than
the unexplained metaphysical phenomena that typified 2001. However,
2001 scores over 2010 in many areas, including its length;
even at over two hours, 2001 barely seemed long enough, but 2010
needed more time to play out. The voice-over narratives are necessary,
but even so, the story seems rushed. Roy Scheider and John Lithgow are
two of my favorite American actors, hands down, and Scheider is largely
responsible for the movie's success. The Discovery sets are reproduced
well - minus, you'll note, the immense circular flight deck - even if the
original movie's subtle zero-gravity effects are not. Subtlety is not a
strong point of 2010. Its predecessor relied on the audience to
pick up on certain cues from the actors, but 2010's Cold War politics
are relentlessly Reaganesque, and the all-too-literal "message"
at the end of the movie hits the viewer with all the gentle grace of an
airliner bursting through a piece of paper. And the music, though nice,
seems oddly pedestrian next to the timeless classics with which Stanley
Kubrick tracked 2001; 2010's music sadly comes across as all-too-typical
"space adventure" music. Some Holst or Strauss would not have
come amiss.
However, it could have been much, much worse. Arthur C. Clarke's 2010
novel contains many of the elements of the same story, but replaces the
out-of-date Cold War political tensions with a boring, if optimistic, sugary-sweet
lack of any tensions whatsoever between the American and Russian crews,
and dwelled even longer than the film did on the damn-near- superfluous
"Jupiter aerobraking" scene. Not that this was an unrealistic
sequence - aerobraking being the method of delivery used to get the Mars
Pathfinder to its target in 1997 - but in the movie, it took on the feeling
of being Yet Another Terrible Peril for our heroes to face. Though it can
never hope to eclipse 2001, 2010 gives its progenitor some much
needed closure.
- screenplay by Peter Hyams
- based on the novel 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke
- directed by Peter Hyams
- music by David Shire and Craig Huxley
- Cast: Roy Scheider (Heywood Floyd), John Lithgow (Walter Curnow),
Helen Mirren (Tanya Kirblik), Bob Balaban (R. Chandra), Keir Dullea (Dave
Bowman), Douglas Rain (HAL 9000), Madolyn Smith (Caroline Floyd), Dana
Elcar (Dimitri Moisevitch), Taliesin Jaffe (Christopher Floyd), James McEaching
(Victor Milson), Mary Jo Deschanel (Betty Fernandez), Elva Baskin (Maxim
Bralovsky), Savely Kramarov (Vladimir Rudenko), Oleg Rudnik (Vasili Orlov),
Natasha Shneider (Irina Yakunina), Vladimir Skomarovsky (Yuri Svetlanov),
Victor Steinbach (Mikolai Ternovsky), Jan Triska (Alexander Kiovalev),
Larry Carroll (Anchorman), Herta Ware (Jessie Bowman0, Cheryl Carter (Nurse),
Ron Recasner (Hospital Neurosurgeon), Robert Lesser (Dr. Hirsch), Olga
Mallsnerd (SAL 9000), Delana Michaels (Commercial Announcer), Gene McGarr
(Commercial Announcer)
- Oops: At no point in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 did Bowman
ever say "My God, it's full of stars" (though he does say it at
the end of Clarke's original novel). Also, 2010's more
"modern" spacesuits made the replica of the 2001 spacesuit
look streamlined and sleek - 2010's designs heavily reference the
Apollo moon suits, but the 2001 suits seem much more advanced, if
a bit less realistic.
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