Nine years on

Another of the movies that was sitting on my DVR for quite some time and nearly about to expire before I finally watched it was 2010: The Year We Make Contact. It's another one of those movies where I'm old enough to remember it having come out in theaters, but not old enough to have actually seen it in the theater. So when it showed up on TCM again I made a point of recording it to be able to do this review.

I'm assuming most people will be aware that this is a sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, along with knowing what 2001 is about. As the sequel opens, Dr. Heywood Floyd (Roy Scheider) is a college administrator working in radioastronomy and tending to one of those radio telescope arrays. He's approached by a Soviet scientist who informs him that the Soviets have been preparing a mission to Jupiter to find out what happened to the Discovery, the ship that Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and crew were on when the HAL 9000 computer (voiced again by Douglas Rain) malfunctioned, dooming the mission. The Soviets are going to get there first, but don't have the expertise to deal with the American computer systems. The Americans, of course, aren't going to get there first, so the scientist, knowing that Floyd was the Earth-bound commander of the failed Discovery mission, wants Floyd and the Americans to cooperate on the Soviet mission to Jupiter.

Now, in the real world, we know that the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991 and had somewhat less bad relations in the years following. Understandably, there's no way people in 1984 when this movie was made could have known all this was going to happen, so the Soviets are still portrayed as a rival to the United States. More specifically, and coloring the plot of the movie, is a story about the US trying to blockade Central American countries -- that whole Monroe Doctrine and all -- and the Soviets trying to break the blockade, which is going to have repercussions even in outer space. But Dr. Floyd agrees to go on the mission. Also on the mission for the Americans are Walter Curnow (John Lithgow), who designed the Discovery, and R. Chandra (Bob Balaban), who designed the HAL 9000.

The Soviet ship Alexei Leonov (named after the first cosmonaut to do a spacewalk) approaches Jupiter, and finds something alarming: it seems as though there might be chlorophyll on Europa, the moon of Jupiter where the monolith that was the point of the original Discovery is located. Perhaps the monolith has something to do with that. In any case, the Soviets running the Alexei Leonov, led by Tanya Kirbuk (Helen Mirren), need Dr. Floyd to help figure out what's going on. He sees this as a warning sign.

But there's still that mission to get on the Discovery and figure out what might have happened to Dave and why the HAL 9000 malfunctioned. As for the HAL, it turns out that the politicians interfered with the mission, and gave HAL direct orders to keep certain information secret from the astronauts on board the Discovery, which led to HAL becoming paranoid and going on the blink. However, things get much more alarming when Dave Bowman himself, or maybe the ghost of Dave Bowan, shows up on the Discovery, to tell Dr. Floyd that they have to leave immediately for reasons Dave can't really explain.

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This is a problem for reasons of orbital mechanics. The mission was designed with the planets being in certain positions at set times, and the fuel on the Alexei Leonov to be used at just the right time to be able to get back to earth. However, if Dave's comments are correct, the early forced departure would result in the crew going to interstellar space rather than being able to get back to earth. And political conditions back on earth are at the point where international cooperation on board the spaceship may have to be suspended.

2010 is certainly an interesting enough idea, and one that's reasonably well executed. But of course anybody who watches this is going to compare it to 2001, and probably not so favorably. For me, the big issue is that the ending is one that I think would violate a whole bunch of scientific principles, although I can't really go into detail about that without giving away the ending of the movie. Somewhat more humorously is the fact that the production design clearly took the Russian language into account -- but somewhere along the way like a game of "telephone" things got just screwed up enough to have all sorts of typos. What it's supposed to say is obvious to anybody who speaks Russian (I studied Russian in college), but is often a bit off.