2010: The Year We Make Contact
What was left open-ended by Kubrick’s masterpiece, Peter Hyams film makes known. What was mysterious by Kubrick, Hyams explains. What was self-contained in Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke decided to expand into a glimpse of a new space race between the U.S. and Russia.
And then, there’s the first words in “2010: The Year We Make Contact”- “My God, it’s full of stars.”
These are reportedly the last words spoken by David Bowman (Keir Dullea) in his last transmission before he disappeared and left Discovery One abandoned around Jupiter’s airspace. In the years since, the US has been unable to explain what happened, and why Discovery’s onboard Hal 9000 unit malfunctioned and killed the crew. Now, after being relieved from duty by the government, Dr. Heywood Floyd (Roy Scheider) has been given an opportunity by his Russian counterparts to go up with their mission to investigate. Along for the ride is one of the engineers of Discovery (John Lithgow) and the computer genius who created Hal (Bob Ballaban). But as the crew soon learns, nothing will be as it seems.
Peter Hyams has been working around Hollywood for several decades, generally (in more recent years) with action films like “Sudden Death,” “Timecop,” “End of Days,” and “The Relic,” which makes his working on this ambitious sequel to a Kubrick masterpiece all the more striking.
And despite it’s more spelled-out nature to the idea-filled richness of “2001,” no one can argue that “2010” isn’t ambitious. It’s filled with intrigue and intelligence, the visuals are striking and imaginative (definitely in keeping with the realism and surrealism of Kubrick’s vision) and it’s capturing of Cold War paranoia- even when such paranoia was beginning to wane in real-life- when unnatural occurrences lead to the brink of WWIII on Earth, which causes tensions and difficulties with the joint Russian-American mission happening by Jupiter, is palpable.
Hyams lacks the artistry of Kubrick, but his film is a terrific space odyssey in the vein of a “Star Trek” or “Star Wars” adventure. It’s smart, exciting, and visually thrilling, albeit in not the same ways Kubrick’s film was. And the music by David Shire (“Zodiac”), despite its’ quotations of the classical music used by Kubrick, is intriguing in that old-synth type of way that brings to mind Wendy Carlos’ music for “Tron” and “A Clockwork Orange,” though is too formula for a story that begs for a little more imagination.
It’s melancholy to think that man is no where closer to being able to “make contact” like that which is made in this film. Here we are in 2010 and we’re still scratching the surface of space exploration, with manned spaceflight still in its’ infancy compared to what’s possible in Clarke’s vision via both Kubrick and Hyams. Still, I think ultimately the point of these films is to inspire man to strive for the unknown rather than chronicle what we’ve accomplished. On that front, both films are equals…even if they take different approaches.
