Cinema of the World

Plot:
Dr Heywood Floyd has been blamed for the failure of the Discovery mission and languishes in disgrace. But then he is secretly approached by the Russians who invite him to take part in a planned mission to Jupiter aboard the ship Leonov to investigate the Discovery’s fate. Floyd joins the expedition, along with engineer Walter Curnow and HAL’s creator Dr Chandra. Once in Jupiter orbit they discover that HAL was driven paranoid by conflicting orders to keep the mission’s purpose a secret. But then David Bowman appears to Floyd as the amorphous Starchild, requesting that they leave orbit immediately as the agency behind the monoliths is about to transform Jupiter into a sun.

A review by IMDb user:
Funny how dated this movie looks today. Billed as a sequel to "2001", it seems reasonable to compare the two.

Good science fiction flicks live or die by the successful suspension of disbelief and solid credibility of the technology. Few scifi films have achieved these points other than "2001", and "2010" certainly isn't one of them, though a few parts come close. The "2001" space tech was all designed by or with the support of Apollo-era aerospace engineers - this shows. The research paid off. The 'fiction' of the science of the technology in "2001" is an earnest artistic extrapolation of science and engineering fact. This is akin to a caricaturist knowing the features of a face so well he can exaggerate it and produce an instantly recognizably caricature. A copycat basing his rendering only the distorted, caricatured version will have an inferior product because its foundation is secondhand impression. This is where "2010" fails a lot of times because much of its space tech design is derivative and little serious research or tought appears to have gone into any of it. The russian craft is big and blocky and looks much like Alien's "Nostromo" and its design is quite improbable for the atmospheric 'aerobraking' supposed to assist its insertion into Jupiter orbit -- a vehicle with any kind of intra-atmospheric capability would have certain aerodynamical features with thermal shielding on its leading edges like you see on the Space Shuttle or the cone shaped CM on an Apollo spacecraft. However, the 'ballute' airbag idea seems credible and it probably came from an actual study in the feasibility of such a scheme. I'm just not sure the realization of the idea as shown in the movie is very credible.

Worse, the interiors again derivatively loot properties from earlier films and some of the set pieces are flat out silly. Notably the big airlock is as silly as they get, with a guy on a wire walking down the wall for no good reason -- in indoor zero g environments people FLOAT to get from place to place. It's safe and practical. And the whole damn interior is loaded full of bulbous CRT screens with endless pixelated color cycles. You can tell how exciting to play with 256 color color mapped bitmaps was to the production designers. In 1984 this was still a novelty and it was used again and again. Did any planning and thought go into the practicality of these designs? On-screen visuals were important in "2001" and some clever concepts shown predating actual animated computer graphics involved 'attract modes -- flashing bold-letter acronyms to permit at-a-glance identification of the nature of data on the following 'pages' of information as curves and text readouts being shown. In "2010" all this stuff is simply eyecandy with no attempt at realism or rationale for why a color cycle on a lo-rez pixel display in any way could help make the information shown more useful.

By contrast, the extremely well conceived spacetech shown in "2001" is timeless and not at all dated to the late 60s in appearence. This is where "2010" fails spectacularly to impress, as its ubiquitous CRT computer screens with crude pixelized computer graphics demonstrates only how shitty computer graphics looked like in 1984. It was no doubt much more complicated and expensive in 1968 to visualize , produce and project "computer graphics" on set-mounted 16mm film screens, but the "2010" production designers neglect to pay such attention to detail and design and they instead revel in bulgy CRTs showing pixelized color cycles.

"2010" was an elaborate and expensive effort to bring Clarke's novel to the screen, but was Hyams fully up to the task? The novel was interesting and the character portrayals in the movie are pretty good. Roy Scheider, Helen Mirren, Bob Balaban, John Lithgow and Elya Baskin all had memorable parts. The cold war stuff seems very dated now, obviously - but it's still interesting to see how the future looked like from the gloomy perspective of the mid 80s. As a movie, where "2010" fails the most seems to be in how literally everything is spelled out. People are TALKING all the time, summarizing and commenting on the action the whole way throug. This leaves little room for dialog-less scenes permitting individual subjective interpretations as in "2001".

The cold war conclusion seems particularly contrived as plot device, though the final scenes are beautifully conceived -- they suffered MUCH in transition to pan & scan VHS. I was very pleased to finally see the last bit in widescreen when I got the DVD.

All in all it's not a BAD movie, but it doesn't have the magnitude, mystery or grandeur of its predecessor. It is very much a movie of the mid 1980s. Where "2001" was an open-ended cinematic 'experience', "2010" seeks to tie a neat little bow to the whole enterprise and serve up light science fiction with pretty visuals in a neat and digestible package geared to the attention spans of its contemporary audiences, hence the continous unrelenting dialog prattle. The brief metaphysical re-apparation of Keir Dulleas character doesn't really work but instead clashes against the strictly literal and mostly hollow nature of the rest of the movie. All in all it's a flawed sequel, but quite entertaining and the ending is no doubt more approachable to most people than the enigmatic "2001" conclusion.

Fun trivia: The cold war TIME magazine cover depicts Clarke and Kubrick as the American and Soviet heads of nations.

Detail: The brilliant visualization in "2001" included such gimmicks as portable wireless data pads. Notice in "2001" as the two Odyssey astronauts have their dinner -- As Bowman descends the ladder from the central corridor he casually leaves his flat-panel quarter-inch-thick datapad gizmo at an angle, later he watches BBC on that. Poole has an identical device, and they both watch the same transmission at the same time, so the devices has to be wirelessly receiving the video stream from inside the ship. Very plausible with today's technology. Even the placement of buttons and absence of keyboard suggests the device resembles an oversize PDA in operation. Were there any such 'speculative but plausible' futurism shown in "2010"?









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no pass