2010: The Year We Make Contact      

By Jeff Shannon

No director could ever have hoped to repeat the artistic achievement of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and nobody knew that better than Peter Hyams, who made this much more conventional film from the first of three sequel novels by Arthur C. Clarke. Whereas Kubrick made a poetic film of mind-expanding ideas and metaphysical mysteries, Hyams shouldn't be blamed for taking a more practical, crowd-pleasing approach. In revealing much of what Kubrick deliberately left unexplained, 2010 lacks the enigmatic awe of its predecessor, but it's still a riveting tale of space exploration and extraterrestrial contact, beginning when a joint American-Soviet mission embarks to determine the cause of failure of the derelict spaceship Discovery. Having arrived at Discovery near the planet Jupiter, the American mission leader (Roy Scheider) and his Russian counterpart (Helen Mirren) must investigate the apparent failure of the ship's infamous onboard computer, HAL 9000, as well as the meaning of countless mysterious black monoliths amassing on Jupiter's surface (an interpretation Kubrick originally left up to his viewers). Meanwhile, Earth is on the brink of nuclear war, and an apparition of astronaut David Bowman (Keir Dullea) appears to repeatedly promise that "something wonderful" is about to happen.

Academy Awards

2010: The Year We Make Contact received Academy Awards nominations for Art Direction/Set Decoration (Albert Brenner - Art Direction, Rick Simpson - Set Decoration), Costume Design (Patricia Norris), Best Achievement in Makeup (Michael Westmore), Sound (Michael J. Kohut, Aaron Rochin, Carlos DeLarios, Gene S. Cantamessa) and Special Visual Effects (Richard Edlund, Neil Krepela, George Jenson, Mark Stetson).

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