The Frustrations of '2010'

The impossible sequel that could have been a contender

I’m going to take a break from notes on classic movies I’d never seen before to discuss a film that wasn’t new to me.

2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984)

I was a huge Arthur C. Clarke fan as a tween, so I read 2010 as soon as it came out and hurried to the theater to see Peter Hyams’ adaptation. But it had been years since I’d seen it, so when I saw it pop up in my TCM app I couldn’t resist watching it again.

It also struck me as a chance to take my own writing advice. I tell aspiring writers all the time that you learn the most from interrogating stories you half-like, and I recalled thinking the movie version of 2010 had been a very mixed bag.

Turns out I’d remembered correctly.

Let’s get this out of the way early: 2010 is not Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It isn’t trying to be 2001. And it shouldn’t be judged as if it is. That’s not fair to the movie and it’s not fair to Hyams.

Hyams takes an approach that in another context might be called earthbound – a closer focus on characters, shipboard routines and engineering puzzles – and lets the cosmic riddles push their way into that narrative. Kubrick, on the other hand, treated the characters almost as incidentals in a million-year story and hurled viewers headlong into those cosmic riddles. It was up to them to find their bearings, or not.

So does Hyams’ approach work?

Well … it could have.

What keeps 2010 from greatness is that Hyams explains too much. Not, “he explains too much in comparison with 2001,” which wouldn’t be fair, but “he explains too much period,” which is. And he explains too much over and over again.

The movie begins with a Cliff’s Notes account of 2001′s plot, something you can argue newcomers to the story needed, but that would have been better handled by incorporating it in an otherwise sharp exchange between Roy Scheider’s Heywood Floyd and a Soviet scientist. Their conversation is a duel for position, one that does a good job catching us up on the geopolitics and the need for another Jupiter mission but also gives us a sense of Floyd as a character. It’s exposition that goes down easy because the characterization serves as a side of sugar. The opening mission briefing, on the other hand? It’s watching someone type. A lot of watching someone type.

During the mission, we get several “Dear Caroline” voiceovers from Scheider, with Hyams using audio letters to Floyd’s wife back on Earth to give us chunks of exposition. Each of these brings the movie to a screeching halt, ladling out information we either don’t need to know or could have learned in a better way.

What drives me crazy about the “Dear Caroline” bits is that Hyams already chose the better way. The scene where Floyd tells Caroline he’s going on the Jupiter mission is terrific, conveyed by showing us Madolyn Smith fumbling dishes and Scheider’s silent self-reproach. To establish these characters’ relationship so deftly and then continue that story so clumsily … I just shake my head. We never see Caroline again or get any sense of how she’s dealing with their separation. Think of what Hyams could have done with the frustrating time delay in Jupiter-Earth communications as a literal metaphor for their emotional disconnect.

This problem derails the ending, too. Hyams restructured Clarke’s story as a cold-war fable, which was smart. But he clutters his ending with way too much hand-holding. The monoliths turn Jupiter into a new star with the gift of habitable worlds and a warning to stay away from Europa – a literally awesome demonstration of cosmic possibilities that stops the U.S.-Soviet war in its tracks. But Hyams appends a schoolmarmish note to the cosmic architects’ message, urging us to use the new worlds together and in peace. And then we get a voiceover from Floyd underlining the lesson yet again.

Contrast that with the silent sequence of a transformed Europa and its monolith, standing watch over what’s to come. Hyams trusts the audience there, and it’s far more effective. This serial overexplanation bugged me as a kid and drives me crazy now that I’m older and make a living telling stories. I think it’s a fundamental flaw that sinks the movie.

But despite all that, I like 2010. No really, I do! When Hyams just lets the characters and visuals speak for themselves, as he does most of the time, the results are terrific.

The visuals are breathtaking – and they serve the movie instead of just SFX makers’ resumes. The scene where John Lithgow’s Curnow crosses from the Leonov to the crippled Discovery is a masterpiece, an evocation of the beauty and terror of space that no one equaled until Gravity. The scale borders on the unimaginable, everything is spinning in different directions, and Hyams makes you feel Curnow’s sense of insignificance and his growing terror. It’s a big scene, but Hyams grounds it with little details, starting with a nice character moment for Curnow and the Russian astronaut in charge of him, then upping the tension with a funny, deft close-up of Lithgow getting yanked out of relative safety into the unimaginable. It’s one of my favorite sequences in sci-fi filmmaking.

Hyams also assembled a terrific cast and gave them lots of great character moments to work with. Scheider is marvelous as always, a generous actor with an instinct for when to play a scene small so that the big scenes will carry more weight. There’s the wonderfully underplayed moment where he comforts a terrified Russian cosmonaut (played by the late Natasha Shneider, who lived a really interesting life) during aerobraking; his fencing with Helen Mirren’s Soviet captain; and any of his scenes with Lithgow and Bob Balaban.

My favorite scene is a small one that’s easy to miss as 2010 hurries towards its climax. Balaban’s Dr. Chandra hands back the fail-safe meant to disable HAL 9000 and matter-of-factly reveals that he found it almost immediately – Curnow and Floyd thought they had HAL under control, but were actually working without a net. Lithgow looks like he’s going to throw up, but then Scheider shoots him a grin of pure delight as Floyd finishes processing this unexpected reversal. It’s a wonderful little moment made indelible by three actors doing great work – but moments like those don’t happen unless a director has given the actors space to find them.

There are a lot of these memorable character moments in 2010, and plenty of movies that don’t have a single one. Which is why I ultimately like 2010 and am sure I’ll come back to it in another decade or so. But when I do, I also know its fundamental flaw will drive me crazy all over again.

Hyams wisely made a movie very different than 2001, and he did an enormous amount of hard work – from set design and SFX to assembling a great cast and supporting them – to tell that story really well. But a few minutes of voiceovers and some on-screen typing make the extraordinary feel ordinary. It’s an unforced error from a storyteller who shows us in the very same movie that he knows better.