I like Peter Hyam's movies, especially the 1981 Outland, and I have a soft spot for 2010. The problem it suffers from is that Kubrick's 2001 raised (and lowered!) the bar for what a sci-fi movie could be. It famously drove the first Star Trek movie into nonesenseville, because Roddenberry felt they had to be going all wacky-high-concept with it.
Once you get over the fact that we're back to a more conventional movie-making space, 2010 puts some (mostly) welcome shape on 2001: A Space Odyssey's story... Kubrick's film is visually impressive nonsense top to bottom, with the HAL story being the memorably coherent part. 2010 is not as good a vehicle for HAL, but it's a fair adaptation of the book, 2010: Odyssey Two (which in itself was expressly a sequel to the film rather than the original book - spot the change from Saturn to Jupiter for instance!).
I have not seen this since the 80s, though, so I might feel differently if I actually sat down to watch it again! 😂
I like Peter Hyam's movies, especially the 1981 Outland, and I have a soft spot for 2010. The problem it suffers from is that Kubrick's 2001 raised (and lowered!) the bar for what a sci-fi movie could be. It famously drove the first Star Trek movie into nonesenseville, because Roddenberry felt they had to be going all wacky-high-concept with it.
Once you get over the fact that we're back to a more conventional movie-making space, 2010 puts some (mostly) welcome shape on 2001: A Space Odyssey's story... Kubrick's film is visually impressive nonsense top to bottom, with the HAL story being the memorably coherent part. 2010 is not as good a vehicle for HAL, but it's a fair adaptation of the book, 2010: Odyssey Two (which in itself was expressly a sequel to the film rather than the original book - spot the change from Saturn to Jupiter for instance!).
I have not seen this since the 80s, though, so I might feel differently if I actually sat down to watch it again! 😂