2010: The Year We Make Contact

Long before we had enough of them to require the term "legacyquel," three attempts were made at decades-later follow-ups to classic Hollywood movies. And, man, was the bar set high for those sequels. Both Psycho II (1983) and The Color of Money (1986) seemed like foolhardy sequels to attempt because the quality, stature, and singularities of the original films were all so impossibly renowned and celebrated. But to make a sequel to Stanley Kubrick's 1968 peerless 2001: A Space Odyssey required an insane amount of hubris. That all three of these '80s sequels, while nowhere near as great as their '60s progenitors, are still terrific pictures in their own right is kind of amazing. But that 2010: The Year We Made Contact—directed, written, produced, and photographed by Peter Hyams, a uniquely gifted though hardly A-list director—turned out so well felt like a miracle.

After Kubrick's 2001 collaborator, novelist Arthur C. Clarke, published his follow-up book 2010: Odyssey Two in 1982, he apparently called Kubrick and jokingly said, "Your job is to stop anybody from making it into a film!" But, of course, MGM optioned the novel and pursued Kubrick to direct. With Kubrick not interested, Hyams jumped in, not only getting Clarke and Kubrick's blessings but entering into a great collaboration with Clarke over the brand new medium of "electronic mail"—their correspondence over the course of the writing and filming of this movie was published in a fascinating book called The Odyssey File. As both a novel and a film, 2010 is a far more straightforward story than its illustrious predecessor. But, unlike so many terrible sequels to great movies, it never undermines its source by rehashing anything or simplistically explaining complex key moments. Yes, this is a far more conventional, tidy, and comforting picture than Kubrick's "Ultimate Trip," but it's a solid piece of near-future sci-fi storytelling.

The plot concerns a Russian mission to Jupiter, where the Soviets plan to board the US spaceship Discovery to see what they can learn about the failed, ultra-secret American mission that encountered a giant monolith in space. Dr. Heywood Floyd, played this time by Roy Scheider, lobbies the US government to make the exploration a joint US/Soviet mission by having him, American engineer Walter Curnow (John Lithgow), and the designer of the HAL 900 computer Dr. Chandra (Bob Balaban) tag along with the Russians. But things are not good between Russia and America in 2010. Even though the scientists try to be above politics, the Russian crew, headed by commander Tanya Kirbuk (Helen Mirren), are distrustful of their additional passengers. These interpersonal suspicions give the picture the underlying feeling of both dramatic tension and real-world relatability. When the astronauts reach the Discovery, they do indeed unlock some of its mysteries, but other ones arise. When a state of war between Russia and the US breaks out back on Earth, things get even more complicated out in space.

The movie brings back Douglas Rain as the voice of the HAL 9000, the paranoid super-computer who killed most of the crew in the original film, and Keir Dullea as the lost astronaut Dave Bowman, who went through the Montolith Stargate at the end of 2001 and ended up spending eternity in some kind of cold, antiquated hotel room. That Dullea looks exactly the same in this movie as he did 30 years earlier and that HAL sounds exactly as he did in the original film is downright spooky. There is a lot about 2010 that gets under your skin simply because it exists in the same fictional milieu as the original picture and deals with the unknown in a similar, though far less mystifying, way. The practical visual effects are by the great Richard Edlund, who also did the more playful effects this same year for Ghostbusters. While the style of creating the space shots is entirely different from those employed twenty years earlier by Kubrick, Douglas Trumbull, and the many FX technicians of 2001, the ships and environments are remarkably consistent. You feel as if you're going back to something that really existed.

Scheider, Mirren, Lithgow, Balaban, and the Russian cast—especially Savely Kramarov and Elya Baskin, who also starred in this same year’s Paul Mazursky/Robin Williams comedy Moscow on the Hudson—all underplay their roles in ways that draw us in. These characters are in incredibly complex and frightening situations, but they are also dealing with the monotony and limitations of existing on a spaceship, and their muted emotions in all but the most dire circumstances are both appropriate and compelling. Hyams, whose other films include Busting, Capricorn One, Outland, Running Scared, and The Relic, makes this futuristic film feel almost like it was taking place in present-day 1984 rather than a distantly remote future. While this grungy, lived-in look and vibe runs counter to Kubrick's cold, sterile aesthetic, it's entirely appropriate for this story, as is the hyper-verbal nature of the screenplay. One of the principal differences between the two films is that 2010 is a movie about passionate humans trying to communicate across vast cultural differences using many many words to engage, defend, and persuade, whereas 2001 is a film about humans that have been drained of much of their humanity using as few words as possible to convey as little information as possible.

Yet 2010 never comes across as overwritten or bogged down with excessive dialogue. It's an incredibly efficient screenplay, with the first act setting up what life on Earth has been like since the events of 2001 (admittedly much more contemporary than the culture we imagine while watching the Kubrick film). Once Hyams has established the characters and mission, he makes a rapid jump forward to the Russian spaceship, arriving at Jupiter's moon Europa, which plays a key role in the development of the story. It's a thrilling elliptical cut that omits all the mission prep, the crew members meeting for the first time, the blastoff, and nearly everything else we'd expect from a typical near-future movie about a space mission. The speed at which the actions in space are conveyed versus the amount of time the characters spend discussing the results of those actions inverts the whole conception of 2001, which lingers on the slow and graceful movement of hardware and people in space while minimizing discussion about the actions the humans are engaged in. I so wish more sequels made bold counterintuitive choices like the ones Hyams made in his screenplay adaptation and direction of this picture.

While the film was moderately successful, it received mixed reviews and hasn't lived on in the hearts of film lovers the way Psycho II and The Color of Money have. Many people object to the idea that the ostensible villains in 2001, Dr. Heywood Floyd and the HALL 9000, are painted as heroes in 2010. Others just find the movie boring. But I have returned to this picture over and over—I've actually seen it more often than 2001 (which is one of my 100 favorite movies). To me, it's a real achievement to turn something so esoteric and almost anti-narrative into such a straightforward work of entertainment without diminishing in any way the power of the original source. When you watch 2010, you immediately want to go back and rewatch the original film, not to cleanse your mind of bullshit the new movie dumped in you, but to reexperience the original film as both what it meant in its era and how its meanings have and haven't changed over the course of time. This is the best any sequel, especially a "legacyquel" can offer.