2010

It seemed appropriate that the first movie we would see in 2010 would be … 2010. I always felt this was a misbegotten project. I can’t say it’s a bad movie, because it is honestly made, not stupid, and is that rare thing, real SF. (Though the director could not stop himself from having things make sounds in vacuum, something we are probably stuck with forever, in serious and stupid movies alike.) This movie’s burden was to be compared to a cinematic masterpiece—I mean what else could we do?—and it was doomed from page one to fail in that regard. The enduring strength of 2001: A Space Odyssey was its stunning ambiguity, its captivating but baffling images that brought even the critics who hated it at first back for a second look, and a third. Everybody has their theory as to what it all meant, that last 20 minutes or so. I have several, but I won’t bore you with them, because I don’t intend to make the mistake 2010 did: It answered all the questions. And the answers were not one thousandth as interesting as the ambiguity. Kubrick allowed us to take what we wanted from those images. Peter Hyams and Arthur C. Clarke couldn’t let it go at that. Clarke was never the nuts-and-bolts guy that Heinlein was, but he wasn’t the ethereal poet Bradbury is, either. His stories always had a sense of awe and wonder to them, but they resolved in one way or another. I wonder if Arthur was secretly bugged by the ending to Kubrick’s film, and yearned to wrap it all up? This movie does that, and fails to awe. Sad example: The appearance of the luminous Starchild at the end of 2001 was a transcendent image, whatever it meant. His brief appearance here, in the prosaic setting of a spaceship interior, is just embarrassing. He looks like a startled fetus caught doing something nasty. This movie was a noble effort in some ways, but it never should have been made.