1984 was an odd year
2010: The Year We Make Contact is the next book in Arthur C. Clarke’s epic series. It starts where the first left off, as a crew of U.S. and Soviet astronauts (and scientists/engineers) head their way towards Jupiter to find out what the heck happened with the crew of Discovery. What they find not only startles them, but it completely turns their worlds upside down. Trying to gather themselves together, they soon find that their own countries are having difficulty understanding each other and a separation is needed between the crews. What happens then is scary as hell. The famously floating, yet unexplainable, black monolith (that is floating near the abandoned Discovery) speaks to U.S. crew chief Dr. Heywood Floyd and warns him that he must depart in two days or face the consequences. Floyd’s job is to now get the crews together, move out of Jupiter’s orbit and get the hell out of the way for something ‘wonderful’ to occur.
There are two main reason why people didn’t take well to this movie. The first is easy, it was nothing like the original. 2001 was epic on so many levels. It not only showed the dedication and love that Kubrick had for Clarke’s vision, but it also showed how much a story can be told with little dialogue. The second reason why this failed is that they cut too many important parts out from the original book. When you stray a bit from the original story or you try to leave out parts, generally that is a recipe for disaster. That’s why most books don’t make great films (LOTR is completely an oddity). I can see that 2010 certainly depended on less about the visuals and more about the story itself. There wasn’t really any art to it, not like 2001. It seemed a bit stale in areas and Roy Scheider (God rest his soul) was great in JAWS, but really wasn’t strong enough to lead this crew. He seemed small compared to everyone else and would have been better suited in another role.
With all of the failures aside, I think this movie did the book some justice. If you’ve ever read 2061 or 3001, then you’ll see some familiar parts in this story. Dave Bowman’s character, being the obvious one, is an oddly placed, but gives you some sort of connection between the films. It’s practically the only thing, outside of the HAL-9000 that is keeping the connection between the films alive. It’s very effective. The message at the end of the film, which I won’t ruin, shows up multiple times in the books following this one. There are traces here and there of a strong connection to a bigger story. I’ve got to give some kudos to Hyams, who brought up the tension between the soviets and the U.S. quite nicely. In 1984 there was a ton of tension. Americans felt like that this period of time there would almost certainly be a breakdown of talks between the two nations and an ultimate disruption that would eventually equal destruction of the countries, potentially the world. This theme was very self-evident in the film and basically took it over for a good period of time. It was not only important to show how in-effective this world would be if both sides didn’t help each other, but it also magnified the end message that the film wished to deliver. It was strong, but I can see why people were upset about it being a strong focus.
Anyway, at the end of the day you have a choice to make: A. Do you love it? or B. Do you hate it? I choose AB. I loved it for what it was trying to do, but I didn’t like it because it was such a departure from the original film. Plus, it didn’t answer all the questions it brought up, which was slightly depressing.
My God… the Blu
For a film that is 25 years old, it looked damn good on Blu-ray. The audio was especially well-done as it boomed through our 7.1 surround system like a hot knife through butter. The visuals were vastly improved, but on occasion there were some artifacts showing up in the picture. Not the best transfer from Warner Brothers, could have used some more love.
As for features… one vintage featurette. I hate vintage featurettes, it’s the lazy-man’s excuse for special features. It’s nice to see what they were thinking back in 1984, but I want to know what everyone is thinking now.