The Hyperlogos

In the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick turned Arthur C. Clarke's first serial, year-named book into an artistic and even metaphysical masterpiece, skillfully representing the story and the visuals while managing to confuse audiences completely — and yet not preventing them from enjoying the story. In 2010, Peter Hyams makes a more conventional picture, but one that is more accessible to audiences and which, not coincidentally, wraps up many of the loose ends found in the original story. Where 2001 was primarily about suspense, 2010 adds more of an element of drama to the picture while retaining the most fascinating aspect of the original story; the interaction between the crew and HAL, the intelligent computer which pilots the space ship Discovery.

In this film, Dr. Heywood Floyd (Roy Schneider) plays the administrator responsible for the Discovery mission. Notified that Discovery's orbit is decaying unexpectedly, he hitches a ride on the Russian ship Alexiy Leonov (sp?) along with HAL's creator Dr. Chandra (Bob Balaban) and engineer Dr. Walter Curnow (John Lithgow.) Upon arriving, they discover both what went wrong with the original mission, and what strange things are happening to Jupiter.

While any inspiration would certainly have worked in the opposite direction, watching this movie recalls to me James Cameron's 1989 movie The Abyss. Both films are set during a Russian-American military crisis and involve alien intervention into Terran affairs that promises to transform human existence. This movie works because it doesn't try to be 2001, a movie which could probably never be made again. It tells the story in the second book of Clarke's series, and it manages to keep non-scientific audiences engaged (for the most part) while never sacrificing the science. This is an important characteristic of Clarke's work, and it's wonderful to see it maintained.

If you are a science-fiction fan, you should have seen both 2001 and this movie already; if not, you should immediately go out and get them both. You can watch them back-to-back; 2001 is pretty heavy, but 2010 is just a movie, albeit a good one. In fact, I would go so far as to say that you can't really understand American sci-fi made after these movies without watching them.