by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was 2010, Peter Hyams’ controversial 1984 sequel to Stanley
Kubrick’s 1968 2001: A Space Odyssey,
based on a sequel novel, also called 2010, Kubrick’s original writing collaborator, Arthur C. Clarke, had
published. You’ll recall that this story originally began life as “The
Sentinel,” a short story Clarke published in 1952 in which a group of
astronauts doing an excavation on the moon find an object of unknown origin (in
Clarke’s original story it was a tall, skinny pyramid, not the oblong monolith
of the movies), dig it up, find it emits a radio signal aimed at an unknown
location far out into space, and conclude it was put there as a signal to let
extraterrestrial intelligences know that humans had progressed far enough to reach
the moon. Stanley Kubrick bought the movie rights to “The Sentinel” and hired
Clarke to expand his little story into a feature film that began with the
monolith making its appearance in prehistoric times and jump-starting human
evolution, then famously cut to the journey of Dr. Heywood Floyd (William
Sylvester in 2001, Roy Scheider
in 2010) to the moon to witness
the discovery of a similar monolith, followed by the journey to Jupiter of five
astronauts and one H.A.L. 9000 computer, where “Hal” — as the computer is
addressed — goes rogue, kills the three astronauts who were on-board but in
hibernation (a form of deep sleep that was also depicted in the original Planet
of the Apes and the recent film Passengers) and also one of the astronauts, Frank Poole (Gary
Lockwood), who has gone outside the spacecraft to repair a faulty antenna that
wasn’t really faulty — HAL lied. The sole surviving astronaut, Dave Bowman
(Keir Dullea — he and Douglas Rain, the voice of HAL, were the only actors from
2001 to repeat their roles in 2010), forces his way back into the spacecraft, Discovery, and disarms HAL’s higher brain functions while
leaving the simply mechanical parts in place, then takes one of Discovery’s space pods and crashes through a long psychedelic
display about which, as he enters it, he says, “My God! It’s full of stars!”
Stanley Kubrick actually erased that line from the original soundtrack of 2001 but Arthur C. Clarke published it in his novel,
conceived simultaneously with the film — Kubrick and Clarke had a deal by which
Clarke would get final say over how the story was told in the novel while
Kubrick would determine the final content of the film, so the two offer us a
rare opportunity to see just what a writer and director on a major film
disagreed about in the conception of their story. Clarke actually published
four novels in what could be called the “2001 Universe,” including one set in 2061 and one in the
30th century, and if nothing else watching 2010 has piqued my curiosity about reading the full cycle.
Clarke had nothing to do with making 2010 besides selling the film studio (MGM, which had also produced 2001) the rights, though apparently both he and Kubrick
gave verbal approval to the film’s writer-director, Peter Hyams, for the
sequel.
Charles casually mentioned that he’d like a chance to see 2010 again, and while he wasn’t expecting to see it again
so soon, I was pretty sure I had it in what I could probably call my “deep
archives,” and I was able to locate a copy I’d home-recorded from Turner Classic
Movies in 2008. I’d seen it before shortly after its theatrical release, when
it hit home cable around 1984 or 1985, but I hadn’t watched it again until last
night — and it emerged as quite a good movie that probably suffered from the
inevitable comparisons with 2001.
It has its flaws: it’s considerably “talkier” — Hyams clearly didn’t share
Kubrick’s attitude towards dialogue (of the 127-minute running time of the
currently circulating version of 2001, only 42 minutes contain dialogue: for most of its running time 2001 is an example of what Sergei Eisenstein in 1930
called “the sound film,” as opposed to the talkie, in which no dialogue would
be heard but music and sound effects would add to the sense of the drama,
whereas 2010 is definitely a
dialogue-driven talkie, the sort of film we’re far more familiar with) — and I don’t think the replacement of the taciturn William
Sylvester (who was still alive in 1984 but had just retired) with the all too
voluble Roy Scheider (not quite
the hot young actor he’d been in the 1970’s after The French
Connection and Jaws but still a bigger box-office draw than a British
actor most Americans had never heard of) as Dr. Floyd was an asset. But if
anything 2010 is even more
politically and socially aware than 2001, and it also relies considerably more on suspense. Dr. Floyd is in
semi-retirement, teaching astronomy after he was forced out as head of the U.S.
space program following the fiasco of the Discovery mission in 2001, only his replacement tries to enlist his help with a new mission to
build a Discovery II, fly it to
Jupiter and find out just what happened to the original craft and to astronaut
Dave Bowman. It turns out that the Russians have also built a spaceship, the Alexei
Leonov, for their own mission to Jupiter to
find out what happened to Discovery,
and Dr. Floyd has to get approval both from the White House (at a time of
skyrocketing tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union due to a
confrontation over Honduras — reflecting the actual politics of 1984, when this
film was made and President Ronald Reagan was using every trick he and his
staff could think of to funnel aid to the Nicaraguan Contras to reverse the Sandinista Revolution, while the
Soviets were backing the Sandinistas) and the Russians to insert himself and
two other U.S. crew members onto the Leonov to make it a joint mission.
The three Americans who
end up on the Leonov are Dr.
Floyd, engineer Dr. Walter Curnow (John Lithgow), and computer scientist Dr. R.
Chandra (Bob Balaban, who’s made up to look strikingly like Scheider’s former Jaws co-star Richard Dreyfuss — Charles complained that
he didn’t look East Indian, and apparently Arthur C. Clarke agreed since he
asked the producers to cast Ben Kingsley in the role), who’s built an equivalent
to HAL named SAL 9000 whose only differences are she speaks with a woman’s
voice and her all-seeing eye is blue instead of red. (I joked that HAL and SAL
were going to mate and bring forth a litter of calculators — “named CAL!”
Charles joked back — and indeed a red calculator appears later in the film as a
sort of abort device to turn off HAL immediately in case he goes rogue again.)
He’s on board the mission so the Americans on the crew can re-start Discovery, which requires them to reboot HAL and take their
chances with him even though he went crazy once before and could conceivably do
so again. When the Leonov gets to
Jupiter they find signs of life on the moon Io and a repulsive force that
pushes one of the astronauts out into deep space when he’s trying to make
outside repairs on the spacecraft — it turns out that the E.T.’s who’ve
secretly been at the center of this entire two-film storyline, from the time
they started dropping monoliths on prehistoric Africa until 2010, have their
home base on another of Jupiter’s moons, Europa and are determined that humans
never be allowed to visit them there, though at the end they send a written
message across the ship’s computer which reads, “All these worlds are yours
except Europa. Attempt no landing there. Use them together. Use them in peace.”
The first two lines are from Clarke’s novel but the last two were added by
Hyams to make the movie more explicitly political, especially since the message
from space immediately inspires the leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union
(represented by a Time cover in
which their appearances are derived from Clarke and Stanley Kubrick,
respectively) to settle their differences over Honduras and stand down. (Now,
what sort of message from space is it going to take to get Donald Trump and Kim
Jong-Un, those two leaders of nuclear-armed countries who are both narcissistic
egomaniacs with bad hair, to stand down from their current nuclear confrontation?) Certainly the ending
reminded me of the 1952 film Red
Planet Mars!
2010 has some odd quirks, including the use of
state-of-the-art 1980’s equipment to represent the ship’s computers and display
screens — with the odd result that it looks more dated than the flat-screen
panels of 2001. (It’s weird, to
say the least, to see this many cathode-ray tubes in a movie that was supposed
to be a high-tech portrait of the future when the cathode-ray tube had
virtually ceased to exist as either a computer display or a TV screen by the
real 2010! But then, a lot of
movies that depicted the acme of high-tech when they were made — including the
1957 film Desk Set, featuring a
state-of-the-art IBM computer which now looks incredibly anachronistic — have
gained unwitting entertainment value by their sheer datedness!) There’s also a
back-handed tribute to the original film’s creator in the name of Russian
cosmonaut Tanya Kirbuk (played by an actress named Helen Mirren who’d become a
much bigger “name” later) — the last name is, except for one letter, an anagram
of “Kubrick.” Overall, 2010 is a
quite well-done and insightful science-fiction piece, suffering from the
inevitable comparisons with the original (I regard 2001 not only as the best science-fiction film ever made
but one of the best films ever made, period) and nowhere nearly as
envelope-pushing (even Douglas Rain as the voice of HAL sounds more chipper
than he did in the first film, and I suspect he was speaking in a higher vocal
range here), but one of the better entries in a genre that has actually produced great literature but all
too few movies worthy of it — and all too many God-awful cheapies (at least
half of the films mocked on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 were science-fiction “B”’s). One ironic bit of
trivia on the imdb.com page for 2010
is that all the models representing spacecraft and the interior sets of Discovery had to be rebuilt for this film (2010 was shot at the main MGM studio in Culver City, now
the home of Sony Pictures Entertainment, whereas the original 2001 had been shot at MGM’s satellite studio in Boreham
Wood, England) because Kubrick had ordered them destroyed at the end of his
production, and I suspect the reason he did that was less that he was worried
about someone wanting to make a sequel and more that he didn’t want some “B”
producer to rent or buy his sets, make an awful movie with them and have
audiences going, “Hey, I remember that! That’s from 2001!”
