2010: To infinity and back again

"We have so much to ask. I have a feeling that the answers are bigger than the questions."

2010: The Year We Make Contact is a well-made movie. It’s thoughtful, big-studio sci-fi at a high level. It’s engaging and sometimes thrilling, with a message as trenchant now as it was back in 1984, when it was released. And it’s a film I have re-visited many times with great enjoyment.

Even so, it should not exist.

But let’s back up. Let’s go all the way back to the formative years, when even being alive felt like a daily struggle:

A group of hominids, early forerunners of mankind, huddle together in a desolate, rock-strewn landscape where food and water are hard to come by. Then, after the appearance of a mysterious black monolith, one of the proto-men discovers he can use an animal bone as a blunt weapon, forever changing. . .

Wait, okay, not that far back.

I think I was in fifth grade, but I could have been younger. We had been called to the gym at Tremont Elementary for a school assembly and a surprise. A magician was going to perform for us. But I am afraid he wasn’t a very good magician. (Those who entertain 11-year-olds for a living might want to find another line of work.) It wasn’t long before we turned on the magician, pointing out that his tricks were obvious, his magic was in plain sight. It was mortifying for the now-sweat-soaked performer, confronted with kids hooting and jeering him – and in truth, it was a bit mortifying for me.

Looking back now, I get it. We kids were promised a spectacle, something that would leave our mouths agape. More that, we were promised a mystery. Our disappointment was palpable, and being 11, it quickly morphed to rage.

At that moment, we were 2001’s angry mob of man-apes.

* * * *

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the most confounding mystery boxes of all time. Chances are that even before you knew it was considered one of the greatest films ever made, someone made you watch it — and you were probably more baffled than intrigued. But you probably still can picture images from it.

Kubrick’s movie challenges the viewer at almost every turn, not only with its vivid portrayals of the past and the future or the questions it ponders about man’s place in the heavens, but also with its sheer narrative structure. It is a film of small, seemingly innocuous, even boring moments, wrapped around a few unforgettable set pieces.

Kubrick was intent on drawing a sharp contrast between the mundanity of everyday life with the wonders of the beyond, suggesting that if we aren’t careful, we might simply be too preoccupied with our personal minutiae to even notice when the universe calls. It’s fortunate for him he didn’t live to see mankind now buried in its cellphones all day long. In 1968, they just had television—and a handful of channels at that.

That’s why after our ape-man throws his bone in the air and it transforms into a spacecraft (one of the great cuts in cinema), the next segment of the film feels so oddly plodding. The humans who inhabit an orbital space station and the American base on the Moon talk in platitudes. The facilities all bear the soulless stamps of global corporations such as IBM and Hilton, as if we have made space just another suburb. If you watch closely, you’ll notice Kubrick spends an inordinate amount of time showing how these people eat, engage in small talk and use the bathroom. The scenes smell of complacency, even hubris. After millions of years of progress, humans may have plateaued.

Finally, another monolith is revealed to have been discovered on the Moon, and the film picks up its pace ever so slightly. Still, there is quite a ways to go before you reach an climax involving astronaut Dave Bowman, a monolith and a “star-child” that some found spellbinding, others mystifying and more than a few (particularly back in the day) appreciated as simply a good head trip.

Like many classics, I find new things in 2001 each time I watch it. Part of the reason is because I have tools now that I lacked for much of my life and with those, I have a deeper respect for cinema that tries to challenge me and feels no need to explain itself. It was important to Kubrick, a genius filmmaker, that the ending of the film remain ambiguous. To him, the experience of the film was the point, an experience he preferred to be as nonverbal as possible.

I share that view, both with respect to the movie and to movies generally. I don’t stop to puzzle out the story. I am willing to suspend my disbelief for as long as plausible. And so, okay, I didn’t know Bruce Willis was dead the whole time in The Sixth Sense, and I didn’t figure out who Keyser Soze really was. I don’t need to know who the murderer is by the end of the first act. It ruins things for me. Give me the mystery.

What was the purpose of the monolith on Earth? Why did HAL kill Frank Poole? What the hell did Dave Bowman transform into at the end? I have never needed to know.¹

Hence, the problem with 2010: The Year We Make Contact.

If any film didn’t warrant a sequel, I would argue it was Kubrick’s. It was a near-perfect representation of one director’s vision imbued with enough uncertainty to father a thousand arguments. But where 2001 is mystical, 2010 is literal. It is a pair of socks worn with loafers. It’s an umbrella on a cloudy day. It’s utilitarian. It’s, I am afraid to say, just another movie.

I don’t blame anyone for this, certainly not the author of 2001, Arthur C. Clarke, who conceptualized the novel in collaboration with Kubrick. These were his characters, his world. He would end up writing a series of sequels, each of them going further in trying to explain the events of the first book.

Kubrick, naturally, wanted nothing to do with a sequel and quickly washed his hands of the entire thing. He did, however, grant his blessing to director Peter Hyams, who simply was not in the same league, as Hyams himself conceded.²

And MGM owned the property and of course studios are always looking to cash on something familiar to audiences.

Tonally, the two films could not be more different. As well made as it is, 2010 is basically a series of annotations that attempt to scale its predecessor down to an accessible size. We have a readily identifiable protagonist in Heywood Floyd, a character from the first movie but now played by a recognizable movie star in Roy Scheider. We have a clear conflict (Soviets! The Cold War!). We have real suspense. (What happens when HAL wakes up?) The narrative is clean.³

2010, which far fewer people have seen, involves a joint U.S.-Soviet mission to Jupiter to investigate the loss of the Discovery from the first movie. On Earth, tensions are high because of conflict in Central America (a very 80s touch).

To the extent the movie works – and honestly it does if you just want a good space opera – is due to the cast. Scheider, who was one of the most unappreciated actors of his day, endows Floyd with a wry humanity that was absent from the first film. The Soviet captain is played by none other than a younger Helen Mirren. And to boost things further, you get Bob Balaban and John Lithgow in supporting roles. That is some 80s candlepower right there.

Where 2001 often floated into the ether, Scheider and company keep the sequel planted firmly in the here and now. (Scheider even delivers a helpful voiceover at times to explain things.) Problems crop up and are solved. Some dramatic spaceflight sequences keep the action going. A key point is revealed to the work of the untrustworthy U.S. government. Near the end, a mysterious figure from 2001 returns to try to give some insight into what happened at the end of that film.

All of it flows logically. None of it will raise your consciousness. And the ending all in all is pretty tidy – a far cry from Kubrick. Suffice to say, war between the U.S. and the Soviets is averted. Yay.

2001: A Space Odyssey was made at the dawn of the so-called New Hollywood era, when audiences seemed to crave new experiences, while 2010 is very much a product of the pragmatic Reagan era, right down to its basic Cold War dynamic. In the time since, with the growth of the internet that has allowed rabid fan bases to connect, we have seen just about every film and franchise analyzed to the nth detail, huge mythologies spun out of thread and creators rebuked if they didn’t provide answers to every single mystery they posed. (See, e.g. TV’s “Lost”). If 2001 were released today. Kubrick would have had to do a round of podcasts to “explain” the ending.

Maybe all of that has come hand-in-hand with a loss of mystery in our own lives and in the lives of others. When I was young, every kid my age dreamed of being an astronaut. Today’s children barely know who they were or what they did. Instead of looking at the stars, we have turned inward as a species, recording our minute-by-minute sensations on social media but rarely stopping to ask profound, or even fundamental, questions.

Kubrick was attempting to make us look beyond ourselves. When I study the production design of his movie, I’m always struck how on point he was with some pieces of technology (Discovery’s crew appears to read from iPad-like tablets) and how far off he was with others. (Moon shuttles, bases, etc.) That wasn’t necessarily his fault. It would have been difficult to predict in 1968, the year before the U.S. landed on the Moon, that man would soon almost abandon space almost altogether. In the last thirty years, many of the great advancements in technology have allowed us to entertain ourselves all day long. As a result, we have become more passive and even more consumed with our own small lives while doubting the value of science more than celebrating it.

The true sequel to 2001 may not have been 2010, but Pixar’s Wall-E from 2008, a story about a sentient computer, like HAL, who evolves and becomes an adventurer while the corpulent humans sit in floating chairs and mindlessly scroll.

In 2010, before HAL is put to rest, he asks his human programmer, Dr. Chandra: “Will I dream?”

“I don’t know,” Chandra replies.⁴

The way we are going, we may need our AI machines to dream. Maybe even to do our dreaming for us. After spending all of our time looking down, we may not be able to gaze upward anymore.

WHERE CAN I FIND IT: 2001 and 2010 are rentable on major platforms.

HEY, ISNT THAT: Elya Baskin, who plays Max, an affable Russian engineer, in 2010, has worked steadily in film and TV for four decades basically playing whatever Russian the story needs him to be. His imdb record is littered with character names such as Orlov, Lenkov, Ditrovich, etc. He’s Latvian.

ARMAGEDDON INDEX (6/10) : It sort of depends on how you define it, but humanity does not cease to exist. So, that’s a plus.

DUST CLOUDS: The Jovian moon Europa plays a signficant role in 2010. Scientists have long been fascinated with Europa because it has oceans beneath its icy crust, which suggests that it may contain building blocks for life. In October 2024, NASA launched the Europa Clipper, a probe that will do fly bys of Europa when it arrives in 2030. The Clipper will reach Jupiter 29 years after the Discovery did in the fictional year 2001.

WHAT ELSE I’M WATCHING: TV: Paradise (S1, Hulu); Movies: Action in the North Atlantic (Bacon, 1943), The Pawnbroker (Lumet, 1964).

TOP OF THE POPS: The number 1 song when 2010 was released was the immortal “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” by Wham! A rather fitting song for a movie that features hibernating astronauts.

LAST ENTRY: The Third Man (1949)

NEXT ENTRY: Asteroid City (2023)

1. It’s fascinating how Kubrick made one film about man destroying himself in Dr. Strangelove and then followed that with a film about how he possibly finds a way to ascend and save the human race.

2. As far as crimes against cinema go, another classic that should have been left alone was Jaws. Add to that list: Psycho, Rocky (yes, I’ll say it), Die Hard, Grease, The Exorcist, The French Connection, Speed, The Blues Brothers, Back to the Future, The Fugitive, and Saturday Night Fever. Not simply because most of the sequels didn’t live up to the originals, but also because those originals were singular works with complete narrative arcs (shark is dead, Rocky fought the good fight, Marty saved the future). What are some of your nominees?

3. 2010 commits a cardinal movie sin by telling us Dave Bowman’s last words were recorded as he entered the monolith in 2001, something entirely absent from the first film as that scene had no dialogue. His words came from the novelization.

4. Chandra, as played by Balaban, has poor social skills and holds an almost messianic belief in the potential of AI. Remind you of anyone?