Julien Neaves, Sci Fi Head Writer
Plot: A joint American and Soviet crew are sent to Jupiter to discover the reason for the failure of the Discovery One mission.
Review: Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the most famous science fiction films ever made and one of the best films of any genre. Its 1984 sequel 2010: The Year We Make Contact directed by Peter Hyams (Outland, Timecop) however, has been relegated to relative obscurity. But is it an underrated gem that deserves more recognition or is it best left forgotten? With an interstellar SPOILER ALERT let’s dive in!
It was highly unlikely that 2010 would reach the filmmaking heights of 2001, and to the sequel’s credit it does try to do its own thing. The film is anchored by excellent leading man Roy Scheider (Jaws, The French Connection) as the determined Dr Heywood Floyd. His performance really lifts the film from dull and generic to halfway decent. Veteran actors Helen Mirren and John Lithgow are also here but the script doesn’t give them very much material to chew on. Keir Dullea returns as astronaut Dave Bowman from the original film (yes, that Dave), though now he is a strange being linked to a mysterious alien intelligence and appears, speaks cryptically, and then disappears again.
And this brings me to another point. 2001 left viewers with several unanswered questions by the end, and that ambiguity is one of the reasons the film has remained so timeless. 2010 seeks to answer some of these questions (why sentient computer HAL 9000 apparently malfunctioned, what happened to Dave in the end) but none of the reveals are all that clever or impactful. The film also introduces some of its own questions about the alien intelligence and the enigma of the monoliths, but none of it is all that intriguing.
2010 is such a departure tonally and structurally that it barely feels like a 2001 sequel. There is a severe lack of the original’s artistic flair and composition, and it plays out very much like a straightforward Sci Fi thriller. The visuals and special effects are solid but none of them come close to the breathtaking sequences of 2001. And the film does muster some tension and dread with the massively multiplying monoliths on Jupiter and the mission’s desperate attempt to escape from the phenomenon, but it is a shadow of the pervasive dread produced just by HAL 9000 in the first film. The ending with Jupiter becoming a new star and HAL transmitting a peace message from the alien intelligence falls quite flat, especially with its misuse of the epic 2001 theme.
2010 is a decent film and worth checking out for completionists like myself. But if you are looking for epic, transcendental science fiction of the cerebral quality, then one would be better off making contact elsewhere.
Editor Jules’ Score: 6 out of 10
Have you seen 2010? What did you think of it? And you can check out more retro Sci Fi reviews below:
Julien “Editor Jules” Neaves is a TARDIS-flying, Force-using Trekkie whose bedroom stories were by the Cryptkeeper, learned to be a superhero from Marvel, but dreams of being Batman. I love promoting Caribbean film (Cariwood), creating board games and I am an aspiring author. I say things like “13 flavours of awesome sauce”. Read more.