2010

Whereas Stanley Kubrick's sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey was a stunning artistic achievement—a poetic film of mind-expanding ideas and metaphysical mysteries—director Peter Hyams adopts a more practical, crowd-pleasing approach in this conventional 1984 adaptation of the first of author Arthur C. Clarke's sequels. Revealing much of what Kubrick deliberately left unexplained, 2010 lacks the enigmatic qualities of its predecessor, but still tells a riveting tale of space exploration and extraterrestrial contact, beginning nine years after the original when a joint American-Soviet mission embarks on a quest to determine the reason behind the failure of the derelict spaceship Discovery. Arriving at the ship near the planet Jupiter, the American mission leader Dr. Heywood Floyd (Roy Scheider) and his Russian counterpart Tanya Kirbuk (Helen Mirren) investigate an apparent malfunction of the Discovery's infamous onboard computer HAL 9000. While also struggling to understand the meaning of countless mysterious black monoliths amassing on Jupiter's surface, Floyd must decipher the cryptic message of astronaut David Bowman (Keir Dullea), who appears before him as an apparition promising that “something wonderful” is about to happen. Making its debut on Blu-ray, 2010 looks handsome in high-def, and includes a vintage “making-of” featurette. Recommended. (J. Shannon)