Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by the week’s new releases or premieres. This week: Celebrate Cold War Week at The A.V. Club with some stellar movies about that decades-spanning conflict.
2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984)
Before going any further, it’s essential to note that, in the entire history of movies, none has been less in need of a sequel than 2001: A Space Odyssey. Especially not the way 2010 does it. To put it very mildly, 2001 is as much about “a bunch of guys on a spaceship with a malfunctioning computer who kills a bunch of them” as life on Earth is about things getting eaten by bears. What’s more, the spell-everything-out literalism of 2010 is at odds with the original’s cosmic opacity. Artistically speaking, the sequel suffers quite a bit in comparison with its predecessor, but it’s not a bad movie per se, and one in many crucial ways pre-compartmentalized, making comparisons unnecessary. The most crucial is that 2010 is, with a typically mid-1980s lack of subtlety, a cry of hope for the end of the Cold War.
Writer-producer-director-cinematographer Peter Hyams—after establishing his film as a discrete entity through a pre-credits montage recapping and literalizing the late passages of 2001—opens 2010 with a scene of two men, one Russian and one American, attempting both physically and verbally to come to an agreement. The information conveyed, setting the plot in motion, is almost less significant than the wide shots of the two men, specks against the background of massive antennae pointed at the stars. “Meet me halfway?” asks the Russian. The American (Roy Scheider, as Heywood Floyd, played by William Sylvester in 2001) reluctantly agrees. The exchange is shot through a metal staircase, with the men standing apart for no discernible reason. They are only able to tell the truth within the pretense of it being a game. And ultimately, the Russian man leaves without telling the American the whole story, trusting him to figure it out for himself.