| Major Cast | |
|---|---|
| Roy Scheider | as Dr. Heywood Floyd |
| John Lithgow | as Dr. Walter Curnow |
| Helen Mirren | as Tanya Kirbuk |
| Bob Balaban | as Dr. R. Chandra |
| Keir Dullea | as Dave Bowman |
| Douglas Rain | as HAL 9000 (voice) |
| Madolyn Smith Osborne | as Caroline Floyd |
| Dana Elcar | as Dimitri Moisevitch |
| Taliesin Jaffe | as Christopher Floyd |
| James McEachin | as Victor Milson |
| Mary Jo Deschanel | as Betty Fernandez, Bowman's Wife |
| Elya Baskin | as Maxim Brajlovsky |
| Saveliy Kramarov | as Dr. Vladimir Rudenko |
| Oleg Rudnik | as Dr. Vasili Orlov |
| Natasha Shneider | as Irina Yakunina |
| Vladimir Skomarovsky | as Yuri Svetlanov |
| Victor Steinbach | as Mikolaj Ternovsky |
| Jan Tríska | as Alexander Kovalev |
| Larry Carroll | as Anchorman on TV |
| Herta Ware | as Jessie Bowman |
| Cheryl Carter | as Nurse |
| Ron Recasner | as Hospital Neurosurgeon |
| Robert Lesser | as Dr. Hirsch |
| Candice Bergen | as SAL 9000 (voice) (as Olga Mallsnerd) |
| Delana Michaels | as Commercial Announcer |
| Gene McGarr | as Commercial Announcer |
| Arthur C. Clarke | as Man on Park Bench (uncredited) |
| MPAA Rating: | PG |
| Distributor: | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) |
| Release Date (US): | 12/07/1984 |
| Domestic Box Office: | $? |
| Foreign Box Office: | $? |
| Production Budget: | $28,000,000 (Est.) |
| Crew | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PRODUCED BY | |||||||
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| DIRECTED BY: Peter Hyams | |||||||
| Visual Effects: | Entertainment Effects Group | ||||||
| Original Music: | David Shire | ||||||
| Cinematography: | Peter Hyams | ||||||
| Film Editing: | Mia Goldman James Mitchell |
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| Casting: | Penny Perry | ||||||
| Production Design: | Albert Brenner | ||||||
| Supervising Sound Editor: | Richard L. Anderson | ||||||
| Set Decoration: | Rick Simpson | ||||||
| Costume Design: | Patricia Norris | ||||||
Nine years have passed since Discovery reached Jupiter and went silent. Now, both the Americans and the Russians are preparing to launch followup missions to find out why. The Russians have a 1-year lead. Conditions on Earth are fraught with peril over a great-power confrontation in Honduras. This puts both sides in a bind. The Americans need to get to Jupiter soonest; the Russians need the expertise of the American builders of Discovery and its HAL-9000 to get them working soonest, if that can be done at all.
Good sense prevails to the extent that three Americans are allowed to ship out with the Russian expedition: Dr. Heywood Floyd, head of the National Astronautics Group; Dr. Walter Curnow, one of Discovery's designers; and Dr. R. Chandra, the designer of the HAL series computers. Approaching Jupiter, they find spectral signatures that suggest chlorophyll on Europa. They send a probe down and see plant life, but the probe is destroyed by what appears to be an electrical surge before it can land.
The Leonov succeeds in aerobraking at Jupiter, establishes an orbit of Io, and links up with Discovery. That ship, and HAL, are restored to working order. Meanwhile things are getting worse on Earth. A Russian ship has been sunk trying to run the U.S. blockade; a Russian laser has destroyed a U.S. satellite. All diplomatic relations between the two countries have ended, and the Americans are ordered to leave Leonov. Both crews await the launch window for Earth, due in about a month. But Dr. Floyd gets a message telling him he must leave in two days, because something is going to happen. He asks what is going to happen. "Something wonderful" is the only answer. However, he is given proof that the message is serious. Against orders, he crosses to Leonov to confer with its captain. She is skeptical of his tale, and there is also the problem of not having the fuel to leave immediately. This impass is broken when they notice that the large monolith has vanished. They come up with a plan: by using Discovery as a booster, they can manage the trip — if they can link the two ships in time, and if everything goes right. It is a big risk, made riskier by the fact that Jupiter starts shrinking before their eyes. And there is still the question of what Earth will be like when they reach it.
From the plot standpoint, 2010 holds together very well given the premises developed in its predecessor film 2001: that highly advanced aliens exist somewhere, that the monliths are their means of interstellar transport, and that they are dedicated to fostering life everywhere. The same is true of the special effects. They are not overdone, and they accord well with what we know of astronautics and science. Of course liberties are taken: we don't yet know how to build a HAL-9000 or put astronauts in suspended animation; we've done aerobraking with unmanned probes, but doing it the way this film shows it is beyond our current abilities; and physics as we understand it now gives us no basis for higher-dimensional gateways like the monolith.1 But that's why 2010 is science fiction.
As with many science-fiction films, its characterization is thin. We do see more of Dr. Floyd. We learn that he was cashiered when the initial Jupiter mission failed, working now as a schoolteacher. We learn that he lost his first wife and has married again, to someone young and brilliant. We learn that he has two children, one from each marriage. And we learn that he was not responsible for the failure of HAL — was in fact unaware of the orders given to HAL that caused the failure. That last revelation is crucial to the plot, and quite a clever element of it IMO.
The film is also quite faithful to Arthur C. Clarke's novel, and as such imparts — not too blatantly — his messages: that peace is better than war, and that monitoring satellites can help to avoid war; and that extraterrestrial civilizations are likely to be beneficient rather than hostile. I happen to agree with the last, and I welcome the fact that SF films have gotten away from the general trend of the Cold War years when most of them had brave humans fighting alien invaders. As for the first two messages, I hold these truths to be self-evident.
My Rating:
9 out of 10
Capsule review: Unlike its predecessor, 2010 mostly avoids the mystical depictions of the aliens. Like its predecessor, it shows us with great verisimilitude the spacecraft and its mission to Jupiter. It gives us good acting, "high concepts," and plenty of jeopardy. All this makes it a very enjoyable film.
| IMDB Rating: 6.8 | Raters: 41,266 |
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