You can't start a review of 2010 without referring to Kubrick's masterpiece 2001. What Kubrick created with that film was create an opera with the stars, polishing the story by Arthur Clarke and giving us a film that's a feast for the senses and in typically Kubrick fashion leaves us with more questions than answers when the closing credits roll.What 2010 does is try to explain what happened to Discovery in the nine years since HAL seemed to go mad and Dave Bowman disappeared. The world is on the brink of destruction between the United States and the Soviet Union (you have to remember this is 1984), but there is one moment of cooperation between the two countries when there is interest to investigate the monolith and the Discovery by the Soviets. The Soviets can get there faster, but the U.S. knows the systems better. The standard Rocky IV "us vs. them" mentality begins as the crew featuring Roy Scheider, John Lithgow, and Helen Mirren revive HAL and try to discover what happened near Jupiter nine years before.
The first thing you need to do when watching this film is to distance yourself from Kubrick's vision in 2001. You will be disappointed and feel negative from the opening credits. Look at this film as a sequel to Clarke's story (which Clarke wrote, along with several sequels). The film explains things while leaving others still under a veil of mystery. I've always been an opponent to explaining every aspect of a film with its sequel, but with 2010 it seems less like a crutch than with other films that have done this (I'm looking at you Halloween II).
2010 is a solid sci-fi tale with some breathtaking effects (even though the dreaded black boxes appear in some shots). It's only crime is that it was a follow up to 2001 and, to be perfectly honest, there is no follow up to that film.
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