2010: THE YEAR WE MAKE CONTACT: My God, It’s Full of Stars

2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984) – Directed by Peter Hyams – Starring Roy Scheider, John Lithgow, Helen Mirren, Bob Balaban, Keir Dullea, Douglas Rain, Elya Baskin, and Dana Elcar.

“Dear Caroline, The first part of this journey is coming to an end. We are about to rendezvous with the Discovery. The race will be on now. We’re going to send a boarding party over to climb inside this 800-foot long shipwreck floating over Io to see if she can be rescued before her orbit gives out. There are nine years of secrets inside, including a sleeping computer who knows the answers. My past is also inside, and I want those answers.”

-Dr. Haywood Floyd (Roy Sheider)

In watching 2010 for the first time, I want to remind people who wished Prometheus was a little less vague to be careful what you wish for.

2010 is a perfectly decent film, but it’s also the kind of film for people who can’t read comics without wanting to know all of the characters’ RPG stats. What 2010 does is attempt to explain the mysteries of 2001. That is not, in and of itself, a horrible idea, but where 2001 is a visual feast and an experience in the importance of sensation over logic, 2010 treating you like your five and continually telling you what’s happening because it thinks you’re stupid.

While I am not interested in basing my overall judgment of 2010 on how it compares to 2001, the structure and execution of 2010 seems to be clearly designed to counter the “problems” with 2001. Stanley Kubrick’s film had no set narrative structure, but was rather composed as four separate sections that link together, but not in a classic beginning-middle-end manner. Structurally, 2010 walks over common ground and comes off like a cross between Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Alien.

Watching 2010 in the wake of 2001 is a bit like going back to a restaurant where the previous dining experience was a 12-course tasting feast prepared by Eric Ripert, and this time it’s reheated meatloaf.

There is nothing wrong with the idea of meatloaf, of course. The advantages of meatloaf (even a reheated meatloaf) is that it’s comfort food. You know what to expect and it’s not challenging. The disadvantage is that while it may be comfortable and thus never sink to the tastebud-driven lows of the charred octopus a la plancha, it also never reaches the heights of the Baked Lobster Goulash. (Yeah, I have no idea how good either of those things actually taste. I’m just menu-diving for examples. No offense, Le Bernadin.)

The most damning part of 2010 is the low regard it holds you in. That quote up top? It’s hardly the only infodump quote in the film. Time and again, we get someone’s voice walking over the footage to tell us things that are rather obvious. It’s incredibly difficult to watch 2010 and not think it was made by someone who was utterly befuddled by 2001 and was determined not to let that happen again, and it’s a shame because if you remove those inane voice overs the film has room to breathe. It is a rather slow-paced film and if all that, “Hi honey, I miss you. We’re about to do something important so let me explain it to you as if you were here instead of 400 million miles away and will get this as a recorded message.”

When a story – be it a film, a novel, a TV show, a poem, etc. – has to continually tell you what it’s doing, it’s a clear sign the creators have little confidence in either themselves or you.

It’s been nearly a decade since the events of 2001 and we enter this movie with the world on the brink of war. The Americans and the Soviets are rattling sabres and moving battleships around the globe like it’s a big ol’ game of Risk. Heywood Floyd was the head of the NCA and took the blame for the failure of the events of the Discovery mission. He’s visited by a Russian who suggests that Floyd attempts to broker a deal with the U.S. government to allow American scientists to board a Soviet mission to the the Discovery. Floyd is successful and they go on the mission.

We get the standard “people waking up out of cryo sleep” sequence, and there’s clear mistrust between the Soviets and Americans. Writer/Director Peter Hyams does a good job creating relationships between Floyd and the Soviet captain (Helen Mirren), American engineer Dr. Curnow (John Lightgow) and the low man in the Soviet pecking order, Max (Elya Baskin), and Hal’s creator, Dr. Chandra (Bob Balaban) and Hal (voiced by Douglas Rain).

The best sequence of the movie is when Max and Curnow have to space walk from the Soviet ship they arrived in over to the abandoned Discovery. Does it go on too long? Yup. Is turning the volume of Curnow’s rapid breathing up to 11 annoying? Yup, but there’s also something right about it. For all the trumped up drama of the United States and Soviet Union being on the brink of World War III, it’s in moments like the space walk that 2010 delivers real drama. Curnow is incredibly nervous and Max is not, and both men are adults and professionals about what’s going on. I love when characters are willing to admit their own shortcomings and then attempt to overcome them, and the interplay between the confident Russian and the nervous American is top notch.

The film’s second best sequence is when Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) makes a return. The question of what happened to Dave at the end of 2001 is on the scientists’ minds and when Max is ordered to take a pod and investigate the monolith, he triggers something in the object and a beam of light shoots to Earth. We see Dave saying goodbye to his widowed wife and comatose mother, and then later he appears to Floyd, telling him they have two days to leave. I actually like the interplay between Floyd and Hal at the beginning of this sequence better than Floyd’s reaction to seeing Dave return, but it’s all intriguing stuff.

It does feel a bit out of place, however, in what has largely been a conventional film, but that actually helps. We know more of the Discovery than the people on this mission, after all, and so it’s actually effective to see the two films collide in this moment.

The ending of 2010 is completely patronizing, however. We get a Jupiter turned into a second sun, which inspires the U.S. and U.S.S.R. to build a campfire together and sing hippie songs, and it’s rather pathetic that the answer to a global crisis is a symbol in the sky. The final message that Hal sends to Earth frames humanity as moronic children who need to be told what to do by their parents:

ALL THESE WORLDS
ARE YOURS EXCEPT
EUROPA
ATTEMPT NO
LANDING THERE
USE THEM TOGETHER
USE THEM IN PEACE

Thanks, Cosmic Entity!

I like the ending for Hal much better, with Dave coming to the computer to offer absolution. That absolution is infinitely better than the insipid programming error in the middle of the film that explains Hal’s behavior from 2001. I didn’t need that explanation. I was okay with Hal’s actions being vague and up for debate.

2010 offers none of that ambiguity, exchanging philosophy for politics, and mystery for explanation.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY: I’m Afraid, Dave. My Mind is Going. I Can Feel It.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – Directed by Stanley Kubrick – Starring Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, and Douglas Rain.

From Roger Ebert’s excellent essay on 2001:
To describe that first screening as a disaster would be wrong, for many of those who remained until the end knew they had seen one of the greatest films ever made. But not everyone remained. Rock Hudson stalked down the aisle, complaining, “Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?”

I’ll give it a shot, Rock.

I’ve been running an incredibly high fever mixed with body chills the past few days, and perhaps that is the best way to watch 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, because I had little energy but to lay on the couch and let the film roll over me. 2001 is not a movie with a typical narrative structure of beginning, middle, and end combining to take you on a singular journey. Instead, there are four separate sections to 2001 – Dawn of Man, the Clavius Base/TMA-1, Jupiter Mission, and Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite, and the experience Stanley Kubrick creates is one of the cinema as spectacle.

The image my mind always conjures up when I watch 2001 is that the proper way to watch the movie is to dress up in a nice suit and tie and go to a theatre (instead of a theater) and just sit there and absorb the film the way you would absorb a piece of orchestral music. Part of this comes from Kubrick’s use of classical music throughout 2001, notably Johann Strauss’ waltz, The Blue Danube, and Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra.

Consistently in 2001, Kubrick manages to make the ordinary extraordinary and the extraordinary ordinary, and the end result is a gorgeous, epic, cinematic masterpiece. Travelling to the moon, for instance, should be an extraordinary event (especially given 2001 being released over a year before Neil Armstrong left his boot prints on the moon), yet Kubrick gets Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) to the moon in ordinary fashion, aboard a Pan Am shuttle, and then when they get there Dr. Floyd helps to run a debriefing session. In this conference room meeting, though, Kubrick starts to turn the ordinary back to the extraordinary, as we learn that the reason why everyone is freaking out about Calvius base is because the scientists there discovered something amazing – a black monolith.

The same (at least in appearance) black monolith that we saw in the first segment of the film, where we spend some non-verbal time watching two ape factions battle over a watering hole.

Whether purposefully or accidentally (or both), the monolith appears at moments that launch humanity into the next stage of their long existence. With the apes, the monolith appears just before one ape learns how to use a bone as a weapon. Next, it appears on the moon, which spurns humanity into deep space exploration to Jupiter, and then in Jupiter it pushes Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) through space where he lives out his days in a white room before being re-birthed as the “star child.”

It’s very easy to see strains of the monolith in Ridley Scott’s recently released Prometheus, with the idea of aliens leaving us an invitation to journey to the stars, but where Scott makes this “star map” into a key component of his film, Kubrick barely raises the issue. It’s there to get the thin narrative moving, but Kubrick has little interest in engaging this idea directly.

So much of 2001 is like this – Kubrick stubbornly sticks to what he wants and you’re either along for the ride, or jetting out of the theater with good ol’ Mr. Hudson.

It takes 25 minutes for anyone to say a word (ape grunting and howling doesn’t count) and nearly an hour to get to what people recognize as the actual heart of the film – Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) and Dave’s journey to Jupiter with HAL 9000 (Douglas Rain).

Why?

Why not?

Instead of giving us that straight narrative, Kubrick keeps coming back to this idea of humanity on the precipice of its next step, and watches how they struggle with going forward or remaining who they are. With the apes, the conflict centers around that watering hole. Each faction wants it. Each is willing to use violence to get it, and Kubrick’s film rewards the ape faction that weaponizes itself.

Except, it’s not the turn to violence that actually propels the apes forward, but rather the use of tools. While the focus in the “Dawn of Man” sequence is of the ape being violent with the large bone, the cut to the next sequence comes when the ape tosses the bone into the air and we get a match-cut linking the bone with an orbital satellite. Now, in earlier drafts of the script, Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke intended for these satellites to be weaponized, which would make violence that critical link between humanity’s past and present, but without clearly marking the satellites as weaponized, I see the link as one of tools and invention more than violence.

This read works at the end of the film, too. When Dave is transformed into the Star Child, earlier versions of the ending had him coming to Earth to destroy those war machines, but in the actual film, the Star Child simply gazes at the planet Earth. This ending is much less definitive, but it’s also much more hopeful.

My favorite section of the film is the second part, where we follow Dr. Floyd around because I just love the routine nature of the entire endeavor. I like that we spend time with Heywood on his Pan Am flight and I like that Kubrick uses the juxtaposition of classical music and futuristic space travel to perfectly complement one another. The music gives the ordinary nature of the action a sense of beauty.

The HAL sequence is the most famous in the film, but again we see just how simple Kubrick plays it. Dave, Frank, and HAL 9000 are headed towards Jupiter. The HAL 9000 computer has never made a mistake.

And then it seemingly does.

Frank and Dave believe they have to consider shutting HAL down and they go into a module so they can talk in private – except they can’t talk in private because HAL can read lips. HAL kills Frank and then refuses to let Dave back on board. Dave gets in anyway and then effectively kills HAL. As Dave is shutting HAL down, HAL is cognizant of his demise, and Douglas Rain’s cold voice reveals this machine as the most human in the film. Repeatedly begging for his life, HAL admits, “I’m afraid, Dave. Dave, I’m afraid. My mind is going. I can feel it.”

It’s tragic and pointed, as this machine that is now begging for his life just killed someone.

Dave takes HAL down and ends up at Jupiter, where he gets sent on an amazing journey that ends with him living out his days in a beautiful, old room. Again, the visuals here are breathtakingly beautiful and for all that 2001 doesn’t give you in story, it certainly delivers in visuals, and while I’m watching the film I’m no less engaged with 2001 than I am with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

And that’s the real brilliance of Kubrick in 2001 – he creates a film that isn’t typical but is still completely engaging. What does it all mean? Well, what do you want it to mean? Kubrick’s film isn’t here to give you answers as much as it is to give you something to look at. If you want to use it as a base to ponder the mysteries of life, of humanity’s evolution, of man’s relationship to the larger universe … 2001 provides the perfect launching.

But if you just want to sit back and watch the greatest and longest music video ever made, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY has got you covered there, too.