As Floyd is visited by Discovery’s captain David Bowman ( Keir Dullea) and HAL ( Douglas Rain) is reactivated, the mission is placed in further jeopardy by the appearance of millions of monoliths that begin consuming Jupiter. Eventually they board the Discovery and begin their investigations but are hampered by the deteriorating political situation back home. En route, the crew, which comprises Russian cosmonauts Tanya Kirbuk ( Helen Mirren), Dr Vladimir Rudenko (Saveliy Kramarov), Maxim Brailovsky (Elya Baskin), Dr Vasily Orlov (Oleg Rudnik), Irina Yakunina (Natasha Shneider), Yuri Svetlanov (Vladimir Skomarovsky), Nikolai Ternovsky (Victor Steinbach) and and American specialists Dr Walter Curnow ( John Lithgow) and Dr Chandra ( Bob Balaban), the designer of the Discovery’s computer HAL 9000, discover primitive life on Jupiter’s moon Europa. They are forced into an uneasy alliance with a Russian mission when it becomes clear that Discovery’s orbit is decaying and that the Soviet’s own mission will reach the stricken ship first.

Now, with the world teetering on the brink of nuclear war (a new addition by Hyams which is notably absent in the novel), the Americans are planning to return to Jupiter to see what happened to the original mission. Nine years after the failure of the Discovery mission to Jupiter, Dr Heywood Floyd ( Roy Scheider) has been blamed for the disaster and is still haunted by what happened to the crew. A film version inevitably followed, written and directed by Peter Hyams, in 1984, titled simply 2010 (the title often attributed to it, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, appears nowhere on screen and is in fact a conflation of the title and the film’s poster tagline). But it got one anyway in the shape of Arthur C. Its enigmatic ending deserved to remain a mystery to be pondered and interpreted by audiences who didn’t need to be spoon fed prosaic answers to the many questions it raised. If ever the was a film that really didn’t a sequel it must surely be Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

2010 odyssey two