bch@mcnc.UUCP (Byron Howes) (12/12/84)
- - - mod.movies - - - - - - Volume 1, Issue 12 - - -
2010: THE YEAR WE MAKE CONTACT
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Peter Hyams is one of the last people whom I would have expected
would make a sequel to 2001. It was the a point of pride with Clarke
and Kubrick that their 1968 film be as faithful to scientific fact as
was possible. Hyams has played fast and loose with scientific accuracy
in his two previous science fiction films, CAPRICORN ONE and OUTLAND.
Hyams was to write, produce, and direct 2010 by himself. Clarke had
retired to Sri Lanka and apparently could not oversee the scientific
accuracy of the production.
So how do the two films compare? Hyams's film by itself is a
remarkable film. As an adaptation of the book, it is a real rarity.
It is a pure science fiction film. That does not mean science fantasy,
it does not mean science horror. It means that this is a film that
takes scientific ideas and plays with them. It does so not to scare us
with monsters, not to give us a western set in space, not to show us a
love story that happens to take place in space. It is an extrapolation
of theory and idea. The story concerns men and women making scientific
discoveries, but it is primarily about the discoveries, not the people
making them. By following a team of scientists as they attack
scientific problems it is closer in spirit to Clarke's RENDEZVOUS WITH
RAMA than it is to 2001.
2010 stands head and shoulders above anything that we could have
expected from Hyams based on his previous work. But that is no
surprise since Hyams merely had to be accurate to a pure science
fiction book. Word has it that it is a fairly accurate representation,
with a few minor liberties. As far as pacing, the second film is a
considerable improvement. Hyams has made a slightly less visual film,
still very visual, and picked up the pace considerably. 2001 was
intended to be a showcase of the future and that means in may places
the plot stops dead to show a visual effect. The new film's science is
a little less accurate. As in OUTLAND, Hyams does not understand
gravity, artificial and natural.
With the exception of scientific errors, the worst faults of 2010
probably lie with Clarke and the novel. The film teasingly promises to
give new insights into the questions raised in the first film. It then
reneges on that promise. When it is over, the alien race is as much a
mystery as it was in 1968. There are more theories as to what the
monolith actually is, but they remain theories. Clarke's "see the
movie, read the book, see the movie, read the book..." does not seem to
be a sufficient answer to the questions. Now it probably is true that
that is a realistic touch. The aliens probably would be unfathomable
to the human mind. But to fall back on that does not make for good
cinema and even makes unsatisfying science fiction. The trailers and
script promise that at the end of the film "something wonderful" will
happen. In fact, what happens is wondrous, but the film is very
unsuccessful in conveying why it is wonderful. Most of the effect of
the something wonderful appears to be that it temporarily averts a war
on Earth and that there are somewhat superficial celestial events that
can be seen from Earth. The full implications of the something
wonderful are never explained. The impact of the something wonderful
on the audience is considerably undercut by an almost identical
something wonderful that happened in another popular science fiction
film of the past few years. That makes the big surprise at the end
something of a letdown.
Production credits are all very good. Visually the film shows a
number of remarkable sights without making them the static set pieces
that the first film made of them. There are still a fair number of
scenes of stark beauty, such as the view of the churning surface of
Jupiter. I was a little sorry to see the part of Heywood Floyd went to
Roy Scheider instead of the underrated William Sylvester, who played
the part in the original and is a familiar face from a number of good
British genre films. John Lithgow is along in large part for comic
relief. Helen Mirren, familiar from THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY and
EXCALIBUR, plays one of the few Russian characters not played by a
member of the cast of MOSCOW ON THE HUDSON. Bob Balaban at first seems
miscast as Dr. Chandra, since he has no Indian accent, but by 2010 he
could be a second or third generation American. In a less than stellar
year for science fiction films this is the best so far. Give it a 2 on
the -4 to +4 scale.
(Evelyn C. Leeper for)
Mark R. Leeper
...ihnp4!lznv!mrl