This week, we here at Astroguyz are going retro with our review. Way back in my pre-historic high school days (like, 1984), my friend and I went to see
2010: The Year We Make Contact in our local theater. At the time, the actual year seemed unimaginably distant, a far future that we would never actually, well,
live in… Well, 2010 is now here. So jJust how well does the movie stack up to reality? Of course,
2010 was the hugely successful sequel to
Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey, which dealt with space travel, artificial and alien intelligence, and the next step in human evolution. The concept was based loosely on the Clarke original short story
The Sentinel, and the concept was that an alien intelligence played a hand in human evolution and had placed artifact(s) in the solar system that we would only discover when we were sophisticated enough to find them. Similar themes are further developed in Clarke’s outstanding
Childhood’s End. In
2010, the film picks up nine years after the original mission of
Discovery One, as a joint US and Soviet expedition is sent to salvage the site. The Jupiter system had yet to be reconnoitered by the
Pioneer and
Voyager spacecraft when
2001 was made;
2010, however, incorporated images and data that by the 80’s were known. The first movie also departed from the book, in that the final action sequence originally revolved around Saturn and its bizarre moon,
Iapetus; the book
2010 centers, like the movie, around the Jovian system; the movie leaves out, however, the side plot of the Chinese landing on Europa.
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