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LowComDom Performances Presents
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LowComDom Performances Presents
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Film Review - 2010 - The Year We Make Contact
Houston... We have a problem! Sorry, wrong space movie.
My God, it's full of stars!
Mission Summary:
1968: Stanley Kubrick releases a space movie with an ending a whole bunch of people don't understand. It begins with 17 trillion establishing shots of the dawn of man. Early man tosses a bone in the air to invent the first space vehicle.
Early space man didn't have a large budget for movie props, so a simple 1:2:3 shape painted black was used. The cheap prop made lots of sound before intermission.
Hippies entered the theater and dropped LSD just before the cool ending no one understood.
Mission Conclusions:
Reason for too many establishing shots: Unknown
Reason for no sex in this movie: Unknown
Reason for no significant violence: Unknown
Reason for deactivation of Hal 9000: He was annoying, and couldn't sing well
My God, it's full of stars!
Twelve years later, someone decides to explain the end of 2001. 2010 is a much more mainstream film, created in a more mature space era than its predecessor. We as an audience are more knowledgeable about space; in fact, space is getting boring to the average Joe.
Where 2001 wowed us with beauty shots of Pan Am Space Clippers (too bad the airline didn't make it to the end of the century), 2010 skips a lot of that because we've seen it both on the screen and in real life.
Unfortunately, the purpose of 2010 is to explain the ending of 2001. This is a bad reason for a film to be made. However, I do like 2010. It is one man's quest for answers, his chance to put some ghosts to rest.
Roy Scheider reprises the role of Heywood Floyd. You remember Dr. Floyd, the guy who fell asleep on the Space Clipper in 1968? Scheider's Floyd is a bit more believable. This is his movie and his ghosts. He's been busted from the Space Cadet Corps because of the problem with the bad ending to 2001, and is now cleaning radio telescopes for a living.
Heywood jumps on the first passing spaceship headed to Jupiter where the bad ending happened. The first thing they do after arriving is to switch the Hal 9000 computer back on to hear the rest of its song, and fix the ending.
Meanwhile, back on Earth...
2010 is a lot about what was happening in 1984. On Earth, the Soviets and Americans are sticking their tongues out at each other in Central America. The cold war of the 1980s heats up to real war in 2010. Like Pan Am, the Soviet Union didn't make it to the end of the century, but that's beside the point. 2010 is the year we make contact ... not with the space aliens, but with ourselves. We are given a good chastising by the landlord. The end of 2010 leaves nothing to be not understood. It's an in-your-face, "here's a message" movie.
I say, let's start bombing Jupiter now!
