What better way to start off the newly minted year than with an unnecessary sequel? What, after all, is a new year? Expensive, the same damn thing all over again, no one ever likes it as much . . .
I’ve never had anything against sequels as sequels. Some of them have their moments: the late Heath Ledger’s terrifyingly inscrutable Joker, the revelation of Luke Skywalker’s parentage, Frankie Pentangeli testifying at the Kefauver hearings, South African drug dealers hiding behind diplomatic immunity, John Amos’ legendary “We’re here to jerk off this cocksucker ‘til he tries to take off . . . period!” When there’s a story to extend, by all means, do so. And, lest we all forget, the movie business is a business, and proven commodities are wise investments.
Some sequels, though, require a more expansive and tolerant mindset to appreciate. I’m not necessarily talking about sequels that flat-out suck, since expansiveness and tolerance shouldn’t be masochistic. But there are movies that feel complete as they are, that upon ending leave no apparent room to continue. Or say all that there is to say on the subject. One such movie is 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Famously born of a proposition made by Stanley Kubrick in a letter to science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke that they collaborate on the “proverbial good science fiction movie,” 2001 took four years and a then-ludicrous amount of money to make, and upon its release in 1968 revolutionized cinematic special effects—Star Wars, for one widely loved example, would not exist without the innovations made by Kubrick and his crew—and, fortunately for the blood pressure of the executives at MGM, made back its no-longer-quite-so-ludicrous budget and then some.
That last I mention only because holy shit, there has never been a weirder commercial hit in the history of cinema. It’s two hours and twenty minutes long, there’s dialogue for about five of those minutes, the whole first half hour or so is about monkeys being taught how to beat the fuck out of each other by a giant black monolith, which has a twin on the moon that people later find, and another much bigger one out by Jupiter that a couple very taciturn astronauts who like taking long, slow jogs in artificial gravity are sent to investigate, only their neurotic computer tries to kill them, leading the more taciturn of the two—the only survivor—to take a closer look, whereupon aliens give him LSD and he turns into a baby orbiting the earth. It’s a great movie to smoke weed to for this reason. It’s not that it doesn’t make sense; it’s simply one of the most expensive experimental films ever made. And it sure as shit is a film, not a movie.
Arthur C. Clarke, having written the novel 2001 while Stanley Kubrick wrote the screenplay, decided to write a sequel to the novel, which incorporated elements of the movie (such as the movie being set, for simplicity’s sake, at Jupiter; the location fees to shoot on Saturn are a little high, and Jupiter gives great tax breaks to film companies). The novel was a hit, and pretty damn good besides, so MGM decided to do it up. Kubrick passed, so Peter Hyams signed on to write, produce, and direct (he was also his own DP).
Peter Hyams’ previous picture was the wildly underrated guilty pleasure Outland, with Sean Connery as a good cop in a mining colony out in the asteroid belt who finds out that Peter Boyle’s been selling space crack to the miners to keep them working longer hours (but space crack, like its earthly counterpart, kills) and takes his ass down with Frances Sternhagen’s reluctant help. Hyams had also, previously, made a good little SF picture called Capricorn One, so he was a logical hire, and though he mystifyingly started directing Jean-Claude Van Damme movies in the 90s, a decade earlier he had a good feel for middle-brow SF. And Outland, in particular, hasn’t dated a bit. I’d go as far as to say that if it had been released 10-15 years later exactly as is it would have done even better.
2010, though, was one of countless movies that lost its raison d’etre with the end of the Cold War. It opens, in one of the most courteous acts of heresy on record, by literalizing, in a series of tersely-worded title cards, the Jupiter mission segment of 2001 (the homicidal computer, the mission commander who disconnected him, and then disappeared, leaving the spaceship a derelict orbiting Jupiter’s moon Io), and then presenting the main dramatic conflict of the story: if the Americans want to find out what happened to their lost spaceship before it crashes into Io, they need to hitch a ride with the Soviets. Careful students of current events will note that there has been no Soviet Union since 1991. (Humorously, the movie also contains a TV ad for Pan Am, which similarly went tits up the same year). As the Soviet Union passed, so did the entire once-robust genre of Cold War stories. The main casualties, genre-wise, were espionage fiction and SF. SF in particular took a major hit. For the previous 45 years, SF writers had been projecting futures in which the US-Soviet conflict was still raging strong, which was hardly their fault. The old farts among us remember all too well that when the Cold War was on, it felt as though it would rage on eternally. So, the fact that the entire dramatic conflict in the movie until the last half-hour—when the aliens pop by to say how do and by the way would you fuck off back to Earth so you don’t get killed—is an anachronism is no one’s fault.
Hyams did exacerbate the problem slightly in his adaptation, though. Clarke’s novel has the same premise and setup as the movie, except that the Russian guy who comes out to chat with Dr. Heywood Floyd (Roy Scheider) at the Arecibo telescopes in Puerto Rico in the opening scene is an old buddy of his, and the reason he’s there telling Floyd that Discovery is going to crash into Io is because he thinks his old friend Floyd will want to go to personally atone for having been responsible for the whole HAL clusterfuck in the first place (Floyd being the bureaucrat who gave the computer conflicting orders about who to tell what about the monolith and the aliens, leading to the computer going apeshit and trying to kill everyone). The Russians are more than happy to have the Americans along to help, since they want to know exactly what the hell happened. Clearly, in the novel, political tensions have eased to the point where, though the Russians are still called Soviets, they’re no longer inscrutable foes, they’re dorks like you and me but with varying degrees of goofiness to their accents. Interestingly, in the novel, the Chinese are the wild card in the mix, much like today.
But since a movie is not a novel, we had a tenser U.S.-Soviet situation in our hypothetical 2010. And since the subplot about the Chinese being the ones who found chlorophyll on ice-bound Jupiter satellite Europa would have taken too long to explain, it’s jettisoned. And Floyd’s wife, who still doesn’t like the fact that he splits to chase aliens for five years, doesn’t divorce him. This is all well and good, since a movie is not a novel. Even changing the Indian computer guy who invented HAL to a white guy isn’t that big a deal—cinematic racial semiotics being what they are, you’re going to get called racist if the computer guy has an Indian accent, and you’re going to get called a racist if you cast a white guy. So, if you’re fucked either way, you might as well just put it out of mind and cast Bob Balaban, because he’ll be icy, poorly socialized, and clearly intelligent, like all good computer guys.
If you’re armed with the expansiveness and tolerance I mentioned earlier, 2010 hums along just fine. The scene when astronaut-turned-alien David Bowman (Keir Dullea) shows up and freaks Roy Scheider out as he passes on the ambiguously worded “get the fuck out now” message from the aliens works nicely, in large part because Keir Dullea, in 1984, looks damn near exactly the same as he did when the original was shot in 1965, which is a little unnerving.
However, the ending, as endings so often do, sucks. It’s one thing to have a traditional three-act structure, or dialogue, or characters with motivations and humanity other than HAL, or cute little “hey, this Russian guy laughs at the same dumb jokes as I do” moments, all of these things malign the memory of the original . . . but when the aliens use the monolith to blow up Jupiter and turn it into a sun (not the dumb part) and the humans are safely on their way home because Roy Scheider, a government bureaucrat, comes up with a wildly complicated scheme (that in the book, John Lithgow's character, an actual scientist, comes up with) involving binding the American and Soviet spaceships together where HAL ultimately blows up and takes one for the team actually works (again, not the dumb part, in spite of the heavy-handed “we can accomplish more by working with each other than against each other” imagery and the whole thing about the flawed character redeeming himself through martyrdom), they send the people a fucking text message that says “ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE. USE THEM TOGETHER. USE THEM IN PEACE.” Whhhhhhhhhaaaaatthefuck.
Now, in the book, that whole bit kind of works for the following two reasons: one, there’s a nice little scene where David Bowman reunites with HAL and Bowman explains if HAL helps him send a message to the humans, HAL doesn’t have to take one for the team. HAL happily agrees, and Bowman uses alien magic to take HAL with him. (Ultimately, HAL’s all right—he freaks out under stress but he’s a pretty good guy for a computer). And two, the message Bowman has HAL send doesn’t have the stupid fucking last two sentences in it. Aliens do not give a shit about the Cold War. The alien in The Day The Earth Stood Still did, but all that proves is that aliens can be hippie nerds too. However, aliens with balls big enough to blow up Jupiter and turn it into a sun are not hippies (though they clearly needed some nerds to handle logistics), nor are they liberals. Blowing up planets, by definition, is not eco-friendly. Right wing aliens aren’t going to give you anything to use in peace. Right wing aliens say “fuck off. Earth can suck my dick.”
Still, in spite of its flaws, its high standing in many questionable aesthetic, moral, and intellectual categories, and its obsolescence as relevant SF, I get a kick out of 2010. My dad took me to see it in the theater when it came out, bought me the book, geeked out about it with me, the whole nine. It was my favorite movie for a while, until something else came out, and even 2001 was never my favorite movie (not even the time a friend of mine and I smoked an eighth to it and I was convinced HAL had hacked into my laptop and was watching me with it so I had to throw a couple sweatshirts over it until the movie was over). Like any good—by which I mean bad—SF movie, the computers have flashing lights. The more flashing lights a computer has, the more powerful it is. And, lest we forget, a young Helen Mirren plays the Soviet spaceship captain. Young Helen Mirren was something else, man.
Hopefully, the movie 2010, as a well-produced but kind of pointless endeavor that trucks along okay until a fucktarded ending, won’t be a harbinger of the year 2010. I’m a little worried, because 2001 turned out to be eerily spot on—weird, druggy, kind of slow, went batshit crazy toward the end. Fingers crossed.
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