1984 was probably the year I made contact with the cinema (I was seven at the time), and this film is among the first I can remember seeing in a movie theater, along with Ghostbusters, Star Trek III, Gremlins, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I suppose 2010 was an “event” film upon its release and therefore something my parents thought I ought to be exposed to. But of course, twenty-six years later, in the very year from which the film takes its title, one really only remembers 2010 as a marginal sequel to one of the greatest movies of all time, one whose rather party-pooping function is to explain away all the forward-thinking psychedelic weirdness of ‘68 and to replace it with something vaguely Spielbergian.
Of course, much had happened to the Hollywood space opera in the interim between Kubrick’s film and Arthur C. Clarke’s 1982 novel (which he tellingly subtitled Odyssey Two), so it’s no shock that the shadows of E.T. and Close Encounters loom fairly large here. What is surprising is that the writer-director-cinematographer(!) commanding this high-profile follow-up should be Peter Hyams. He had earned his sci-fi street cred, such as it was, with 1977’s Capricorn One, a blunt and amateurish film that has the distinction of being the most anti-NASA/space program film ever made. (It’s also a rogue’s gallery of desperate, sagging late-70s B-listers, including Elliott Gould, James Brolin, Brenda Vaccaro, Sam Waterston, Karen Black, O.J., and Telly Savalas.) Hyams partly made up for it with the rather taut, High Noon-derived space station thriller Outland (with Sean Connery), and indeed the best scenes in 2010 involve similarly tense spacewalking, but such beginnings hardly place one in an ideal position to follow in the footsteps of the greatest science fiction film, like, ever.
To make matters worse, Hyams penned his own screenplay based on the Clarke novel, peppering the entire film with banal expository voiceover, often in the form of reverb-heavy letters to and from Earth. The closing lines, from Roy Scheider’s Dr. Heywood Floyd, inaptly convey the gravitas of mankind’s first contact with an extraterrestrial other as a sort of intergalactic rental agreement:
You can tell your children of the day when everyone looked up and realized that they were only tenants of this world. We have been given a new lease and a warning from the landlord.
The dialogue (including one memorable exchange between Scheider and John Lithgow about ballpark hot dogs) is also disastrously corny, but Hyams has a good cast, and in any case they’re bound to be more conventionally sympathetic than Kubrick’s characters. To borrow Network’s archetype-descriptors, Scheider is the crusty, but benign astrophysicist who enlists Lithgow and Bob Balaban (as HAL’s programmer/best friend) to figure out just what happened on the Discovery’s mission to Jupiter. Because this is the 1980s, when all serious movies where obliged to address the threat of nuclear annihilation in a syrupy, toothless manner, the Americans must pal up with the Russkies to figure out the whole business, occasioning supporting roles from Helen Mirren as a hot Russian cosmonaut named Kirbuk (Kubrick backwards, sorta), MacGyver’s boss Dana Elcar as a somewhat unconvincing Soviet bureaucrat, and of course Elya Baskin, the go-to Russian character-actor of the mid-80s and beyond the infinite.
But the film definitely has its moments. For all of the flaws in the film’s dorky writing and truly ham-fisted editing, Clarke’s story is pretty good, and whatever cosmic strangeness is explained is done so via Keir Dullea, strolling through the film with a creepy grin on his face, vaguely prepping us for “something wonderful.” He visits his wife (Mary Jo Deschanel, mother to both Donna Hayward and Zooey Deschanel) through the TV and spirits into his bed-ridden mother’s hospital room to brush her hair, then has an odd conversation with Scheider while morphing from man to old man to really old man to fetus, à la 2001’s final sequence. HAL also gets some great scenes, including some fun stuff with Balaban who wakes him up from slumber only to later convince him to commit A.I. suicide. (Earlier, Balaban has an icky, semi-romantic scene with another computer, the SAL-9000, huskily voiced by an uncredited Candace Bergen.)
Still, the lingering problem is that Hyams is no Kubrick – or Spielberg – and the amount of attention to verisimilitude in the prior film is sorely missed here. Spacecraft soar across the surface of Jupiter with absurdly unconvincing speed and a great deal of noise. Didn’t everybody know, at least by 2010 if not 1984, that in space no one can hear you talk about hot dogs or nuclear war? You would think that Hyams, given a new lease on Kubrick and Clarke’s vision, would’ve at least been told by the landlords to keep the noise down.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: MGM/UA DVD / Netflix VOD
02 Jan 2010 2:31 PM | Comments (5)
I wholeheartedly agree, Leo. When I was a young boy obsessed with all things 2001, I devoured Kubrick’s film and Clarke’s novelization, and then subsequently swept up Clarke’s novel sequels and this film. While I barely touched the novel sequels, I at least made it through Hyams’ film. As you say, he is no great talent and the film has its annoying incongruous moments (such as when the scared female Cosmonaut has to cuddle up with Roy Scheider for comfort due to his maximum manliness). Nevertheless I found it to be quite competent, and in my opinion better than Clarke’s novel.
Clarke’s novel (and subsequent “sequels”, which had so many discontinuities between them that he went on to say each “sequel” took place in its own parallel universe) effectively removes humans from the narrative, something that I didn’t find at all in 2001 (the film or the novel). Even though it is never revealed what the purpose of turning (or evolving) Bowman into the Starchild is, 2001 is about key moments in man’s evolution, and how extraterrestrial life has influenced and effected that change. In 2010 (the novel), the monoliths/alien intelligence are only concerned with evolving creatures on the surface of Europa (and in so doing, have decided to eliminate a species evolving on Jupiter, which is an interesting moral plot line to introduce). Mankind seems to be something that’s just in the way, and Bowman’s purpose seems to be no more than a spokesman for the aliens/monoliths, just so they can tell humanity to piss off.
I like that Hyams, in his 80’s end-of-Cold-War fervor, tweaked this idea to be more of a warning towards humanity, that us lesser beings need to stop being so petty and warring amongst each other all the time or ELSE. Despite the heavy handedness of that, I prefer it to “hey humanity, we’re kinda bored with you, we’re gonna do something else now, m’kay?”
So point to 2010 the film in my book. However, any sequel to 2001 was doomed to failure in comparison, wasn’t it? :)
I only have vague memories of this movie, mainly that 7 year old me thought faux-Russian Helen Mirren was purrrrty. Also, the cast of Capricorn One sounds intense!
Capricorn One is garbage. Great premise, terrible everything else. It really makes you think less of O.J.
When I was seven, Capricorn One was on Showtime approximately 72 times per day for about six months. I liked the film very much, but haven’t seen it since then and have zero trouble believing I would loathe it now. Even with my memories fading all the way back to those halcyon late-seventies days, I can see from this great distance that it could truly be classified as the red-headed step-child of the great conspiracy films of that decade. It even has a cheap rip-off of The French Connection when Gould finds him in a sabotaged car, accelerator irrevocably stuck.
I find 2010 to be very similar to all the rest of Hyams’ films, which basically means I dislike it intensely. How this guy was let within forty miles of this project, I’ll never know. There should’ve been a law-suit or something. Outland is horrible (horrible!) and it’s downhill from that lofty pinnacle.
As much as I have been a fan of Scheider, he’s no good in this film, and really, neither is anyone else. Except perhaps Balaban. But the narration is truly the severed Achilles’ tendon for this film. I can’t abide it for one minute. It’s some of the most dreadful stuff I’ve ever heard. David Shire’s horrifically dated synth-score (it sounded dated by 1985) doesn’t help.
I really liked Bill’s write-up above, but I find the novel to be a much better (exponentially, even) experience. The sequence with the Chinese landing on Europa was pretty neat-o. I can’t say the same for 2061 or any other derivation.
The only thing I hank this film for is this: the beautifully rendered silently cart-wheeling Discovery, lost at sea, covered in dust. I’m a sucker for any image of Jupiter, and adding the haunting image of that beautiful ship in the foreground was/is an undeniable pleasure.
Finally, I’ll sign off with my recollection of Newsweek’s brief review of the film. I read it, all of three or four paragraphs (and short ones, at that), with outrageous expectations for greatness (I was in sixth grade). The review concluded by saying the film’s conclusion had all the power and majesty of “yesterday’s weather report.”
“It really makes you think less of O.J.”
So that’s why everyone turned on him…
Bill B.
3 January 2010
10:56 PM