That Time They Made a Sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey

When I was a kid just starting to appreciate movies as more than a diversion from playing with toys and video games, I had a few secrets. That's how they felt at the time, anyway. My early exposure to film appreciation came from my father, who was an avid collector of movies on physical media. He was a LaserDisc collector in the era of VHS, which means he was classy. This meant I had access to a bevy of interesting, adult-focused films that my friends and peers had never heard of.

They were films that fired my imagination, and they would have a profound impact on shaping my tastes and my appreciation of film itself. These were my secrets. I felt keyed into a world of stories my friends could never understand. I was one of those kids who couldn't wait to grow up, and I often felt alienated by how immature I felt my peers were (when really they were just acting their age). Enjoying movies made for adults made me feel like one, at a time when I desperately wanted to. And to this day, my friends (new friends, who are all much more interested in film) still don't talk about a lot of these movies.

Having revisited a number of these films, which I may write about in the future, I can share my disappointment that they do not all hold up. My understanding of film and storytelling was still gestating at the time, so of course they didn't all turn out to be winners. 2001: A Space Odyssey was a winner, of course. But so was, somewhat unexpectedly, its sequel.

At this point I don't think it's controversial to say that Stanley Kubrick is a legendary filmmaker whose 13 feature films are among the most influential in cinema. The fanboyism surrounding Kubrick ranks among the the highest of all the auteurs, and to many people the mere idea of creating a sequel to one of his films is sacrilege. But I'm not here to talk about Doctor Sleep. I have not seen that film.

Putting aside the magnitude of the impact 2001: A Space Odyssey has had on our culture, it is arguably the most Kubrickian of all Kubrick's films. It is driven by its visuals and the very deliberate pairing of music, and little else. Dialogue is so scarce that film critic Roger Ebert called it "in many respects a silent film." It doesn't function like a normal movie. We, the audience, do not watch the film for its characters' journey, and the film does not attempt to access our empathy. The themes are ambiguous, confusing even, especially upon first viewing.

From what I have read, Doctor Sleep seems to succeed in making a sequel to The Shining by being a sequel to Kubrick's film that doesn't try to be a Kubrick film. You can't out-Kubrick Kubrick, after all, so Mike Flanagan wisely chose to make a Mike Flanagan film. In 1984, Peter Hyams made the same decision about 2010, apparently with the encouragement of Stanley Kubrick himself (his only involvement in the sequel).

Unlike the film of 2001, Arthur C. Clarke's novel is a more straightforward story, a style he would also use for the book's three sequels. The film adaptation of 2010 follows suit, with a more traditional style of cinematography (provided by the film's director), dialogue from people who act like human beings, character arcs, and a bespoke music score that actually made it into the film. You know, normal movie stuff.

2010, sometimes subtitled The Year We Make Contact, is about a joint Soviet-American mission to return to the Discovery, the slender spacecraft of the first film, to investigate the reasons for the failure of its mission, the death of its crew, and the malfunction of its onboard supercomputer, HAL 9000. Accompanying the Soviet crew of the Leonov, is Dr. Heywood Floyd, played by the charismatic Roy Scheider, in stark contrast to the original detached performance by William Sylvester. Floyd is responsible for the original Discovery mission, and therefore the lost astronauts. Also aboard, Walter Curnow (John Lithgow), designer of the Discovery, as well as Dr. Chandra (Bob Balaban), the creator of HAL 9000.

What follows is not at all like the original film. Rather than a timeless art film with visual effects that still hold up 50 years later, 2010 is a film very much of the 1980s. The clean, minimalist aesthetic of 2001, with its round rooms and curved chairs, which still looks futuristic today, is instead replaced by the dark, dirty, heavily manufactured industrial design that dominated science fiction cinema in the wake of films like Alien and Peter Hyams's own Outland. The flat panel displays, which predicted both vertical and square video, are replaced by the CRT televisions of the mid-'80s. The design of the Leonov is bulky and not as recognizable, or as visually appealing, as the ships from 2001. (It also doesn't help that I keep mistaking it for an Earth warship from Babylon 5.) Everything new the film brings to the table stands in stark relief against the original film's design language, though in a way this actually serves the film when characters return to beautiful recreations of the original film's Discovery sets.

But the design isn't the only thing that dates the film. Both the film of 2010 and the original novel were released in the 1980s, and the Cold War is a major driving force for the story. The reason there is a joint Soviet-American mission at all is because in this world the space race never really stopped. The Soviets have a ship that will get to the Discovery first, but it's the Americans who know how to safely reactivate both the ship and the HAL computer. Back home, tensions between the two superpowers escalates into open conflict, creating a forced rift between the two sides of the crew.

At the time of 2010's release, with 40-some years of Cold War in recent memory and no end in sight, this was a very relevant geopolitical situation, and the fear of nuclear war was still very real. Much of the plot is built around the idea that the U.S. and the Soviet Union could start fighting any moment, but now that that is no longer the case in reality* 2010 loses a lot of its ability to stand the test of time. Just another thing placing this film at odds with its predecessor, which has a vision of the future that is still plausible and beautiful today (even if the year it takes place is a little... off).

I was born the year after 2010 was released in theaters, so by the time I saw it the Soviet Union had already collapsed. But the Cold War so permeated the film culture I was absorbing, I felt like I understood it as though it were still happening. Other favorites of mine from this time were The Hunt for Red October, obviously a Cold War movie, and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, which was created specifically as an allegory for the fall of the Iron Curtain. And of course let's not forget the James Bond franchise, and all the other action and spy movies that spent so many years casting Russians as the enemy.

In a way, I think knowledge of the Cold War and its impact on the world was something that let me pretend I was an adult. It meant I could speak to adults with an understanding of how the world functioned that my peers didn't seem to exhibit**. It made me impressive to adults, which made them take me more seriously than they did other kids of my age (as if being an eight-year-old who counted 2001: A Space Odyssey among his favorite movies wasn't enough). This is the kind of secret knowledge that films made for adults contained for a young child like me.

But the Cold War is not why I cared about this movie back in the day. I liked 2010 because I thought it was genuinely good, and I was admittedly a little terrified that would no longer be true upon viewing it as an adult, that this would become one of the childhood favorites that revealed itself to be bad, actually. And while 2010 may have some aesthetic issues that date it, the rest of the film, I'm extremely happy to report, is pretty solid.

Dr. Floyd, elevated to the role of protagonist, is compelling (though I credit this more to Roy Scheider than to the character as written), and so is Dr. Chandra. I do wish Chandra's arc had been given more space to breathe (it's possible some scenes were cut), as I felt the film only scratched the surface of what is by far the most interesting relationship in the film, between Chandra and the complex, intelligent machine he not only created but cares for deeply. Also ship designer Curnow has a friendly relationship with Russian crewmember Maxim (Elya Baskin) that is the center of one of the film's big moments of tension. They even attempt to have Floyd and mission commander Tanya Kirbuk (Helen Mirren) get familiar in order to stir up some empathy, but it's pretty insubstantial. And truth be told, all these relationships and arcs are pretty insubstantial, but they are enough. Just enough, in fact.

2010 is more focused on continuing to build on the larger ideas introduced in the first film. Now there's a Monolith several kilometers long, and it's more active than previous Monoliths. And it's orbiting Jupiter for an active purpose, one that puts the crew of the Leonov in real, actual danger. Stanley Kubrick's vision of this universe doesn't provide easy answers, but Arthur C. Clarke's does. Clarke was involved in the development of the 2010 film beyond just writing the source novel, so the film is much more explicit in explaining its events.

I love science fiction movies about big ideas. Sometimes if the ideas are big enough it can carry me through even a mediocre film. For example, I love Star Trek: The Motion Picture, despite the fact that it is often painfully boring, because it is a big, galaxy-brain exploration of big sci-fi ideas. And the event at the climax of 2010 is a big science fiction idea that is so fascinating in its possibilities that it kind of makes me sad that there were never further adaptations of the Odyssey series (though there have been attempts). 2010 goes beyond its predecessor in explaining what happens in the film even if it never really gets into the why. Well, we do get one why.

The one thing from 2001 that the sequel does explain is why HAL decided to murder the crew of the Discovery. It essentially comes down to "conflicting orders," and it's not particularly satisfying, which even back in 1984 highlighted a danger of revisiting things that have decades worth of mystique surrounding them, and is a thing we have to deal with constantly in the reboot-heavy film landscape of today. I didn't remember the explanation for HAL's homicidal rampage until rewatching the film recently, and that's because I don't think I ever needed to know it. 2010 is at its strongest when it's pushing forward, which thankfully is what it spends most of its time doing.

2010: The Year We Make Contact is an engaging film, an impossible follow-up to one of the most celebrated films of all time. It could never hope to reach the heights of its predecessor, but it never attempts to, and it is better for it. It's a good story, it's told well enough, and it's respectful to the first film. It's a shame that 2010 is largely forgotten these days. I was right to like this movie as a kid. It wasn't just fun to watch, it was genuinely compelling, and it is worthy of standing beside its much more famous and celebrated predecessor, like two suns in the sky.

* The current U.S.-Russia situation could also be described as a Cold War, but it is not (currently) driven by mutually-assured nuclear destruction.

** To be clear, I'm not trying to accuse my childhood friends of being intentionally uninformed or something, and just because we didn't talk about the Cold War doesn't mean they weren't also aware of it.