The acclaimed director Stanley Kubrick set out to get in touch with Arthur C. Clarke and make
perhaps the greatest science-fiction film of all time. Kubrick wanted to not only make a
science-fiction film, but a work of art, something that dealt with the very soul of the human
condition and mankind's place in the universe. MGM had hoped for bigger-named stars for the film,
but Kubrick felt that the budget would be better served on the special effects,
which he was adamant about getting right. As soon as the general public had access to the film,
people came in droves. 2001: A Space Odyssey did good business with audiences--especially younger
ones--making just under twenty-two million dollars in theater rentals in its initial worldwide run,
against a budget of as much as twelve million. To date, the movie has made an estimated
grand total of as much as one hundred ninety million dollars at the worldwide box office,
though it gets tricky to properly adjust the figures for inflation.
Steven Spielberg called 2001 the "big bang" for filmmakers of his generation,
who found themselves deeply moved and inspired by Kubrick's vision. These days, it is a frequent
fixture on top ten lists of greatest films ever made, and in the humble opinion of this geek,
it is, without hyperbole, the best and most important science-fiction film of all time.
It has been nine years since David Bowman disappeared after discovering an alien monolith
in orbit around Jupiter. Now, scans from Earth indicate that the derelict Discovery is moving,
and only the Soviets will have a spacecraft ready to intercept it
before it descends out of reach into the gaseous atmosphere of the solar system's largest planet.
Heywood Floyd, the scientist who oversaw the Discovery mission, is tasked with joining the
Soviets on their mission, to help solve the mystery of what happened nine years ago, along
with HAL's creator, Dr. Chandra, who will revive the homicidal A.I. in search of answers. Once
they approach Jupiter, however, the international crew of the Alexei Leonov discover that something
is happening on Jupiter's moon of Europa and that the monolith isn't finished with humanity.
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During the production of 2001: A Space Odyssey, MGM studios got a written agreement to the rights
for any potential sequel, even though, for many years, neither Arthur C. Clarke nor Stanley
Kubrick showed any interest in creating one. However, at the dawn of the 1980's,
Clarke received a one million dollar advance to write 2010: Odyssey Two, a book that isn't,
strictly speaking, a sequel to either the novel or film versions of 2001, but rather a sequel
story that takes ideas from both sources and updates the science for a post-Apollo world.
Before 2010 was published in 1982, there was already talk of an inevitable film adaptation,
with most of the trades assuming it would be directed once again by Kubrick.
However, Clarke, after the novel was published, telephoned Kubrick and told him, half-jokingly,
to make sure nobody could bother him by turning it into a movie.
MGM--then rebranded as MGM/UA after acquiring United Artists--quickly
realized that the written rights agreement from 2001 wasn't a binding contract, and so
the studio spent an undisclosed seven figure sum to secure the rights to Clarke's follow-up novel.
There was some drama involving a producer who left MGM/UA and joined 20th Century Fox around
this time, claiming she personally owned the rights and thus planned to produce 2010 for Fox,
but this was resolved within a few months in favor of MGM/UA.
Beyond this dispute then, the studi's first order of business was securing a producer and director,
and they naturally turned to Stanley Kubrick, who wasn't interested.
Enter Peter Hyams, director of the modest sci-fi successes Capricorn One and Outland. Hyams was
only interested in turning 2010 into a movie after securing the blessing of Kubrick, who told the
younger director to approach the project without being afraid of dishonoring his work. Hyams then
took the jobs of producer, director, writer, and eventually even director of photography.
When writing the screenplay, he started up a cutting edge e-mail correspondence with Arthur
C. Clarke using Kaypro computers on opposite sides of the globe in order to collaborate on changes to
the source material. Hyams' subsequent script stuck relatively close to the novel, with a few
omissions and a more obvious Cold War message, and it was greenlit for a twenty-five million dollar
budget by November of 1983, with a projected release date of December the following year.
For the lead role of Heywood Floyd, the studio wanted a leading man with more presence than
William Sylvester, who played the role in 2001 and who had probably aged out of it.
Hyams chose Roy Scheider, made famous in films like The French Connection and
Jaws. Scheider gives Floyd a strong personality that carries the movie with a
homey but intelligent blue-collar charm that the actor is so good at delivering.
Opposite him in the role of the Russian captain, Tanya Kirbuk, is Dame Helen Mirren in her first
American film. Mirren, the daughter of an exiled Russian noble born and raised in England, had to
deliberately exaggerate her Russian accent in the film in order to disguise her heavy British one.
"You have been drinking your whiskey from Kentucky."
"Oh-ho, I wish I had."
Kier Dullea and Douglas Rain reprised their roles as Dave Bowman and HAL, respectively--
"What is going to happen, Dave?"
"Something wonderful."
--and the critical role of Dr. Chandra, HAL's creator, who Clarke had hoped to
be played by Ben Kingsley, was given to Close Encounters of the Third Kind's Bob
Balaban. Filling out the cast are John Lithgow as Colonel Curnow, Elya Baskin as Max--
"Piece of pie."
"Cake, piece of cake."
--and Dana Elcar as Dimitri Moisevitch.
Clarke himself was given two cameos: one as this old man feeding birds in front of the White House,
and here on a magazine cover as the US president beside Stanley Kubrick as the Soviet premier.
Also worth noting are the accomplished musician Natasha Shneider as Irina,
and a vocal cameo by Candice Bergen, credited under the pseudonym Olga Mallsnerd, as SAL.
"Will I dream?"
"Of course you'll dream."
Principle photography on what was then called 2010: Odyssey II began in February of 1984 on
a tight 71-day shooting schedule. Most of that was done on closed sets on the MGM lot in Culver City,
though there was a week of location shooting at Washington, D.C.,
Rancho Palos Verdes in California, and the Very Large Array in New Mexico. Hyams' first choice for
this scene was the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, but after scouting it out, he decided it
wasn't a good fit for a film crew. Both locations would later be used in the 1997 film Contact.
The primary sets for this film--the Discovery and the Leonov--posed separate challenges. For the
Discovery, they had to rebuild everything from scratch using only a cut of 2001 as a template.
Kubrick, apparently thinking of the way famous sci-fi props like Robby
the Robot from Forbidden Planet would sneak into multiple additional movies, had all the models,
sets, and sketches from the original film destroyed so that they couldn't be used again.
It's a testament to the design team, headed by production designer Albert Brenner,
that they were able to so faithfully reproduce the Discovery sets--all but the expensive spinning
chamber, that is--that actor Kier Dullea remarked he felt like he had traveled back in time.
The Leonov, however, had to be designed from the ground up, and the operational mandate
from Hyams was to make it feel more true to life, as 2010 was being made in a time when people had
actually gone to the moon. Hyams wanted to ditch the sterile and more spacious look of the Discovery
and replace it with a more cluttered, claustrophobic, and practical appearance.
For the majority of the raw designs, he turned to the legendary Syd Mead, and with the help of
Hyams' own father, who was a Russian émigré responsible for most of the Cyrillic text,
the trio set out to make a ship that would approximate future technology
in a way that was both believably functional and distinctively Soviet.
Hyams also mandated that these sets be lit diegetically, meaning that there
were few sources of light outside of what exists within the world of the narrative.
To compensate for the lack of stage lights, Hyams used light-sensitive
"fast film," and the result on screen is a high contrast but sometimes muddy grain
that gives the movie a unique quality that most viewers will probably only notice subconsciously.
There were also several optical effects, including some primitive CGI, that were overseen by Richard
Edlund, who was briefly partnered with Douglas Trumbull, the legendary effects man who had gotten
his start on 2001. Perhaps the most ambitious effect was a photorealistic Jupiter, created by
Digital Productions using raw photographs of the gas giant taken by Voyager. These images were fed
into a supercomputer to give them an ever-changing fluidity that was then projected onto a sphere.
"This is pretty neat."
For the music, Hyams originally hired Genesis co-founder Tony Banks to create
an electronic score, but he later changed course and gave the job to David Shire,
who crafted a mostly synthesized soundtrack with a few subtle touches
like the manipulation of whale song to lend the film an unsettling, lonely atmosphere.
2010 was released in December of 1984 to middling reviews that couldn't help but
compare it unfavorably to its predecessor. Despite competing with Beverly Hills Cop, Starman, and
Dune, however, 2010 ultimately made forty million dollars domestically in its initial run, making
the film a financial success. Sometime after its release, it was retitled to 2010: The Year We Make
Contact, and it maintained a lowkey popularity among sci-fi buffs, though it could never hope
to become the groundshaking success of 2001. It has aged pretty well, and remains something a
little greater than a cult classic, a movie that, when divorced from Kubrick's masterpiece, stands
very well on its own as a more conventional sci-fi adventure that is arguably Peter Hyams' best film.
Indeed, while I have gone on record stating that 2001: A Space Odyssey
is my favorite science-fiction film, I can admit that 2010: The Year We Make Contact
makes for an more entertaining movie. It doesn't have the coldly detached perspective of 2001;
its structure is less experimental; its characters are more engaging; and its pacing is much easier
on the old attention span. I highly recommend the movie, especially to people who don't care much
for 2001, because it does contain a lot of the same basic sci-fi concepts in a more digestible
form. It replaces weighty, pretentious meditations on human conciousness with a character-driven
tale of regret and the need for closure, as epitomized both by Floyd's gnawing guilt over
what happened to Dave Bowman and by Chandra's unanswered questions about HAL's malfunction.
I absolutely adore the charactarization of both Bowman--whose inhuman Star Child is somehow more
warm and sympathetic than Bowman ever was as a mere human--and HAL, whose decision to accept
his own sacrificial death is probably the most emotionally draining moment of the entire film.
"Do you want me to stay with you?"
"No. It is better for the mission if you leave."
Naturally, the story also leans very heavily into Cold War themes of cooperation between the Soviets
and the Americans, with one of the opening lines giving away its theme as bluntly as possible:
"This is very bad for my asthma. You think you could meet me halfway?"
"Maybe."
This theme does get a bit anvillicious by the end, with the final message from whatever intelligence
guides the monoliths telling humanity to use the solar system together in peace, but it is no less
relevant today than it was at the height of the Reagan years. If you need any extra convincing of
that, compare this scene of the Soviets and the Americans aboard the Leonov having to separate
themselves due to political tensions at home with the real life scenario of those two cosmonauts
aboard the International Space Station when Russia decided to invade the Ukraine a couple weeks ago
and the one American who is scheduled to be flown home by a Russian Soyuz at the end of the month.
Even if there weren't worrying current events to lend the film an extra dimension of relevance,
though, 2010: The Year We Make Contact would still be a movie I would highly
recommend to fans of science-fiction cinema. It is still a good movie that
has a lot to offer audiences young and old, and it is still a sci-fi classic.
And that's all for today, my fellow Earthlings. How would you compare 2010 with 2001?
Let me know in the comments, and while you're there, don't forget to like and subscribe if you
haven't already. If you'd like to support what I do even more, please consider joining my Patreon
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The Streaming Heap and From Here to Paternity, available wherever you get your podcasts,
and my debut novel Paradox, available through Amazon. You can find links in the description and
on my website at emagill.com, where you'll find written reviews of plenty more sci-fi classics in
both film and literature. Until next time, though, when we'll celebrate five thousand subscribers
with a discussion of the importance of following quarantine protocols, this is The Unapologetic
Geek, telling you to never be ashamed of what you love, as long as you're not hurting anybody.
"Easy as cake, huh?"
"Pie. Easy as pie."