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103

This is like if they decided to make a sequel to Blade Runner.

Oh, wait.

15

Why is there sound in space now?

4

I’m reading Michael Benson’s book on the making of 2001 and recently visited the Museum of the Moving Image exhibit about the film, so I had to finally watch this sequel. It’s such a strange effort, in that it feels almost nothing like Kubrick’s work even though it takes place in recreations of several of his sets, and features several of his cast (along with a lead character from his film played by a new actor).

Visually, 2010’s dim corridors and sweaty, workmanlike astronauts look a lot closer to Alien than 2001, and there are probably more lines of dialogue in this movie’s first 15 minutes than in the entirety of the original. Just about everything Kubrick left deliberately…

Review by matt lynch ★★★½ Liked

deciding to follow up one of the most perfectly crafted and purposefully enigmatic films of all time with a willfully expository science-laced procedural thriller is undeniably a bonehead move, but if you can somehow divorce this from its predecessor it remains pretty sturdy and frequently exciting. Hyams rarely worked with great material but he was always a first-rate carpenter. he's got a great cast on his hands here (i could watch a whole movie of Roy Scheider, John Lithgow and Helen Mirren just kicking it on a spaceship together doing astronaut stuff) and he gets a lot of visual mileage out of kit-bashed spaceship interiors and sly reframings of Kubrick's designs, although as gorgeous as the analog FX spectacle is here it's unsurprisingly far less seamless than that of the pioneering film it follows.

8

If you totally and completely, and I mean TOTALLY AND COMPLEYELY, try your absolute best to ignore the fact that this is a sequel to one of the greatest films ever made, then it's really not all that bad. I'm super serial.

It has an impressively stacked cast and the story is sort of moving. Yeah, Dave shouldn't have been in this. Just ignore the first one! Stop it! I said quit it!

Then it's fine.

2

There’s probably a lot more to say about this given that it is a structurally and intellectually inverted sequel to one of the most important films ever made, but my main takeaways seeing it for the first time in 30ish years are 1) Nolan jacked a lot of this for Interstellar and 2) Helen Mirren as an angsty Cosmonaut is the sexiest character I’ve come across in many years.

7

If you can separate this from the masterpiece it's a sequel to, then it's a pretty cool sci fi procedural with Roy Scheider.

6

At exactly 20:33 into the film, for about 4 seconds, there is a shot of a pool inside of Roy Scheider’s house with 2 dolphins yapping in it.

The fact that 1984 us thought that 2010 us would have dolphins living in our homes as pets is the most 1984 thing ever.

Review by Josh Lewis ★★★ Liked

A very literal-minded adaptation of the sequel novel to 2001 which unfortunately takes everything cosmic, poetic, and ambiguous about Kubrick's adaptation and tries to simplify it so that it can fit snugly into a Cold War procedural; the way things cleanly wrap up with HAL and the monoliths and then sign-off by stating the message strikes me as particularly egregious. However despite this inherent flaw baked into it as a sequel the practical mission sequencing and mystery storytelling itself (where the characters go over all the tech hardware of the previous film to figure out what went wrong and learn lessons about international scientific cooperation in the process) is actually fairly engaging on its own , the cast is obviously putting in good work, and Hyams brings his usual good-looking widescreen shooting and analog craftsmanship to it.

[35mm]

3

Action! - The Unlikely Rumble: Hill v Hyams

We began this marathon with a Hyams who was incredibly safe in his storytelling and looked to not have the balls to do something that might not be risky; but now I have to say he deserves a round of applause for the daring with which he wanted to approach a challenge. None of this is more evident than making a sequel to not only a classic, but a Stanley Kubrick film.

And, needless to say, this film pales in comparison to Kubrick's masterpiece. But what really struck out to me was how, through pacing and a few other visual elements, Hyams attempts to make the movie feel like a direct successor…

2

"What's going to happen, Dave?"
"Something wonderful."

In 2010, nine years after the Discovery mission to study the mysterious monolith in Jupiter's orbit was lost, both the US and the Soviet Union are rushing to launch spaceships to reach Discovery One and find out what happened. When the spaceship is discovered to crash into Io soon and the US mission will arrive too late, the Americans agree to a t mission with the Russians, despite rising global tensions between the two superpowers ...

2010: The Year We Make is a science fiction film written and directed by Peter Hyams, based on the novel 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke. It's a sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey (my…

9

It simply isn’t possible to discuss this film without taking the original film into - Stanley Kubrick’s legendary ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’ Being one of the most widely revered films ever made as well as my own personal favorite, it sets a high (if not downright unreachable) bar for anyone who dare attempt a sequel to it, if a sequel could even be achieved at all. That was a film made by a literal genius, years in the making, with a meticulously chosen, top-of-the-line crew capable of making every working part of it function perfectly on its own and in the grand scheme of the picture. It was thoughtful, meditative, and most importantly, drenched in subtlety; a sequel would…