2010: The Year We Make Contact
Encyclopedia
Jupiter is engulfed by monoliths, which increase its density to the point that nuclear fusion
Nuclear fusion
Nuclear fusion is the process by which two or more atomic nuclei join together, or "fuse", to form a single heavier nucleus. This is usually accompanied by the release or absorption of large quantities of energy...

 occurs, transforming the planet into a small star
Stellar nucleosynthesis
Stellar nucleosynthesis is the collective term for the nuclear reactions taking place in stars to build the nuclei of the elements heavier than hydrogen. Some small quantity of these reactions also occur on the stellar surface under various circumstances...

. Discovery is consumed in the blast, but Leonov breaks away and begins its long journey home. The new star's miraculous appearance later inspires American and Soviet leaders to seek peace. Over the centuries that follow, Europa gradually transforms from an icy wasteland to a humid jungle covered with plant life... while a Monolith stands in the primeval Europan swamp, waiting for intelligent life forms to find it.

Cast

  • Roy Scheider
    Roy Scheider
    Roy Richard Scheider was an American actor. He was best known for his leading role as police chief Martin C...

     as Heywood Floyd
  • John Lithgow
    John Lithgow
    John Arthur Lithgow is an American actor, musician, and author. Presently, he is involved with a wide range of media projects, including stage, television, film, and radio...

     as Dr. Walter Curnow
  • Helen Mirren
    Helen Mirren
    Dame Helen Mirren, DBE is an English actor. She has won an Academy Award for Best Actress, four SAG Awards, four BAFTAs, three Golden Globes, four Emmy Awards, and two Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Awards.-Early life and family:...

     as Tanya Kirbuk
  • Bob Balaban
    Bob Balaban
    Robert Elmer "Bob" Balaban is an American actor, author and director.-Personal life:Balaban was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Eleanor and Elmer Balaban, who owned several movie theatres and later was a pioneer in cable television...

     as Dr. R. Chandra
  • Keir Dullea
    Keir Dullea
    Keir Dullea is an American actor best known for the character of astronaut David Bowman, whom he portrayed in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey and in 1984's 2010: The Year We Make Contact...

     as Dave Bowman
  • Douglas Rain
    Douglas Rain
    Douglas Rain is a Canadian actor and narrator. He is primarily a stage actor, but his best known film role was as the voice of the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequel 2010 ....

     as the voice of HAL 9000
    HAL 9000
    HAL 9000 is the antagonist in Arthur C. Clarke's science fiction Space Odyssey saga. HAL is an artificial intelligence that interacts with the astronaut crew of the Discovery One spacecraft, usually represented as a red television-camera eye found throughout the ship...

  • Madolyn Smith
    Madolyn Smith Osborne
    Madolyn Smith Osborne is an American actress.Madolyn Smith Osborne may be best-known for her roles in the TV miniseries If Tomorrow Comes and the feature film Funny Farm, which co-starred Chevy Chase. In 1984, she appeared in 2010, with Roy Scheider...

     as Caroline Floyd
  • Saveliy Kramarov
    Saveliy Kramarov
    Savely Viktorovich Kramarov was a well known Soviet actor, known for his comedic roles in Soviet films of the 1970s.He was born in Moscow. In 1979, shortly before emigration, he became a practicing Orthodox Jew....

     as Dr. Vladimir Rudenko
  • Taliesin Jaffe
    Taliesin Jaffe
    Taliesin Jaffe is an American voice director, script writer, voice actor, and former child actor.Jaffe was born in Los Angeles, California. He is known for directing and writing many English language anime titles for New Generation Pictures, most notably R.O.D the TV and Hellsing...

     as Christopher Floyd
  • James McEachin
    James McEachin
    James McEachin is an American actor, award-winning author, and known for his many character roles such as portraying police Lieutenant Brock in several Perry Mason television movies.-Military career:...

     as Victor Milson
  • Mary Jo Deschanel
    Mary Jo Deschanel
    -Life and career:Deschanel was born as Mary Jo Weir. In her first major appearance in show business in 1983, Deschanel played Annie Glenn, the wife of the astronaut John Glenn in the movie adaptation of the Tom Wolfe book, The Right Stuff....

     as Betty Fernandez, Bowman's widow
  • Elya Baskin as Maxim Brajlovsky
  • Dana Elcar
    Dana Elcar
    Dana Elcar was an American television and movie character actor. Although he appeared in about 40 films, his most memorable role was on the 1980s and 1990s television series MacGyver as Peter Thornton, an administrator working for the Phoenix Foundation...

     as Dimitri Moisevitch
  • Oleg Rudnik as Dr. Vasili Orlov
  • Natasha Shneider
    Natasha Shneider
    Natasha Shneider was a Russian musician. She was most notably the keyboardist and vocalist in the musical group Eleven, and was the partner of bandmate Alain Johannes...

     as Irina Yakunina
  • Vladimir Skomarovsky as Yuri Svetlanov
  • Victor Steinbach as Nikolaj Ternovsky
  • Candice Bergen
    Candice Bergen
    Candice Patricia Bergen is an American actress and former fashion model.She is known for starring in two TV series, as the title character on the situation comedy Murphy Brown , for which she won five Emmy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards; and as Shirley Schmidt on the comedy-drama Boston Legal...

     as the voice of SAL 9000 (credited as "Olga Mallsnerd")

Cameos

Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke
Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FRAS was a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, famous for his short stories and novels, among them 2001: A Space Odyssey, and as a host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World. For many years, Robert A. Heinlein,...

 appears as a man on a park bench outside the White House
White House
The White House is the official residence and principal workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., the house was designed by Irish-born James Hoban, and built between 1792 and 1800 of white-painted Aquia sandstone in the Neoclassical...

 (which is out-of-frame in the pan-and-scan
Pan and scan
Pan and scan is a method of adjusting widescreen film images so that they can be shown within the proportions of a standard definition 4:3 aspect ratio television screen, often cropping off the sides of the original widescreen image to focus on the composition's most important aspects...

 version, but visible in the letterboxed and widescreen
Widescreen
Widescreen images are a variety of aspect ratios used in film, television and computer screens. In film, a widescreen film is any film image with a width-to-height aspect ratio greater than the standard 1.37:1 Academy aspect ratio provided by 35mm film....

 versions). In addition, a Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...

magazine cover about the American-Soviet tensions is briefly shown, in which the President of the United States
President of the United States
The President of the United States of America is the head of state and head of government of the United States. The president leads the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces....

 is portrayed by Clarke and the Soviet Premier
General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the title given to the leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. With some exceptions, the office was synonymous with leader of the Soviet Union...

 by the 2001 producer, writer, and director, Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades of his career...

.

Development

When Clarke published his novel 2010: Odyssey Two in 1982, he telephoned Stanley Kubrick, and jokingly said, "Your job is to stop anybody [from] making it [into a movie] so I won't be bothered." Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. is an American media company, involved primarily in the production and distribution of films and television programs. MGM was founded in 1924 when the entertainment entrepreneur Marcus Loew gained control of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures Corporation and Louis B. Mayer...

 (MGM) subsequently worked out a contract to make a film adaptation, but Kubrick had no interest in directing it. However, Peter Hyams
Peter Hyams
Peter Hyams is an American screenwriter, director and cinematographer, probably best known for directing the 1984 science fiction adventure 2010 , Capricorn One, the comic book adaptation Timecop and the Arnold Schwarzenegger horror/action film End of Days.-Family:Hyams was born in New York...

 was interested and contacted both Clarke and Kubrick for their blessings:
"I had a long conversation with Stanley and told him what was going on. If it met with his approval, I would do the film; and if it didn't, I wouldn't. I certainly would not have thought of doing the film if I had not gotten the blessing of Kubrick. He's one of my idols; simply one of the greatest talents that's ever walked the Earth. He more or less said, 'Sure. Go do it. I don't care.' And another time he said, 'Don't be afraid. Just go do your own movie.'"


Clarke's correspondence with Peter Hyams, the director of 2010, was published in 1984. Titled The Odyssey File: The Making of 2010, this book illustrates Dr. Clarke's fascination with the then-pioneering medium of e-mail and his use of it to communicate with Hyams on an almost-daily basis during the planning and production of the film. (Clarke was living in Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka, officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka is a country off the southern coast of the Indian subcontinent. Known until 1972 as Ceylon , Sri Lanka is an island surrounded by the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait, and lies in the vicinity of India and the...

 while the production was taking place in California.) This book also includes Clarke's list of the top science fiction films ever made. Unfortunately, in order to give the publishers enough lead-time to have it available for the release of the movie, the book terminates while the movie is still in pre-production. At the point of the last e-mail, Clarke had not yet read the script, and Roy Scheider was the only actor who had been cast.

Special effects

The special effects for 2010 were filmed on 65mm film (the live action scenes were filmed on 35mm) and, due to the differences in film size and ratio, there is a noticeable "cut off" area at the side of the picture during the space scenes when the film is viewed in widescreen. The effects were produced by the Entertainment Effects Group (EEG), the special effects house created by Douglas Trumbull
Douglas Trumbull
Douglas Huntley Trumbull is an American film director, special effects supervisor, and inventor. He contributed to, or was responsible for, the special photographic effects of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner and The Tree of...

. However, Trumbull himself did not work on the film, and the effects were supervised by Richard Edlund
Richard Edlund
Richard Edlund, A.S.C. is a multi-Academy Award-winning US special effects cinematographer.Edlund was born in Fargo, North Dakota. After first joining the Navy, he developed an interest in experimental film and attended the USC School of Cinematic Arts in the late 60s...

, who had just left Industrial Light and Magic
Industrial Light and Magic
Industrial Light & Magic is an Academy Award-winning motion picture visual effects company that was founded in May 1975 by George Lucas and is owned by Lucasfilm. Lucas created the company when he discovered that the special effects department at 20th Century Fox was shut down after he was given...

. After completing 2010, EEG would become a part of Edlund's own effects company Boss Film Corporation
Boss Film Studios
Boss Film Studios is a visual effects company, founded by visual effects veteran Richard Edlund after his departure from Industrial Light and Magic, producing visual effects for over thirty films from 1983 to 1997...

.

Early in the production of 2010, Hyams found out that the original 50-foot model of the "Discovery One" that had been built for 2001 had also been destroyed following the filming, as had all of the original model-makers' designs for building it. The model-makers at EEG had to use frame-by-frame enlargements from a 70 mm copy of the original film to recreate the "Discovery One".

Although computer-generated imagery
Computer-generated imagery
Computer-generated imagery is the application of the field of computer graphics or, more specifically, 3D computer graphics to special effects in art, video games, films, television programs, commercials, simulators and simulation generally, and printed media...

 (or CGI) was still in its infancy in 1984, the special effects team of 2010 used CGI to create the dynamic looking cloudy atmosphere of the planet Jupiter, as well as the swarm of monoliths that engulf the planet and turn it into a Sun for the planet Europa. Digital Productions would use data supplied by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center and NASA field center located in the San Gabriel Valley area of Los Angeles County, California, United States. The facility is headquartered in the city of Pasadena on the border of La Cañada Flintridge and Pasadena...

 to create the turbulent Jovian atmosphere. This was one of the first instances of what the studio would later refer to as "Digital Scene Simulation," a concept they would take to the next level with The Last Starfighter
The Last Starfighter
The Last Starfighter is a 1984 science fiction adventure film directed by Nick Castle. The film tells the story of Alex Rogan , an average teenage boy recruited by an alien defense force to fight in an interstellar war. It also featured Dan O'Herlihy, Catherine Mary Stewart, Robert Preston, Norman...

.


In order to maintain the realism of the lighting in outer space, in which light would usually come from a single light source (in this case, the Sun
Sun
The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is almost perfectly spherical and consists of hot plasma interwoven with magnetic fields...

), Edlund and Hyams decided that blue-screen photography would not be used for shooting the space scenes. Instead, a process known as front-light/back-light filming was used. The models were filmed as they would appear in space, then a white background was placed behind the model. This isolated the model's outlines so that proper traveling mattes could be made. All of this processing doubled the amount of time that it took to film these sequences, due to the first motion-control pass that was needed to generate the matte. This process also eliminated the problem of "blue spill", which is the main disadvantage of blue-screen photography. In this, photographed models would often have blue outlines surrounding them because a crisp matte was not always possible to make.

Blue-screen photography was used in the scene in which Floyd demonstrates his plan to use the two spaceships to achieve the change in momentum needed to leave Jovian orbit before the opening of the launch window. In this scene, Floyd uses two pens to demonstrate his plans. Roy Scheider performed this scene without the pens actually being present, and the pens were filmed separately against a blue screen - using an "Oxberry" animation stand that was programmed to match Scheider's movements. (The initial sequence of Floyd's making the pens float was carried out by simply attaching them to a polished piece of oscillating glass that was placed between him and the camera.)

Music

Initially, Tony Banks
Tony Banks (musician)
This article is about the musician. For other people named Tony Banks, see Tony BanksAnthony George "Tony" Banks is a British composer, and multi-instrumentalist, who performs as a keyboardist and a guitarist...

 (keyboardist for the band Genesis
Genesis (band)
Genesis are an English rock band that formed in 1967. The band currently comprises the longest-tenured members Tony Banks , Mike Rutherford and Phil Collins . Past members Peter Gabriel , Steve Hackett and Anthony Phillips , also played major roles in the band in its early years...

) was commissioned to do the soundtrack for 2010. However, Banks' material was rejected and David Shire
David Shire
David Lee Shire is an American songwriter and the composer of stage musicals, film and television scores. The soundtrack to the movie The Taking of Pelham 123 and parts of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack such as Night on Disco Mountain, an adaptation of Modest Mussorgsky's Night on Bald...

 was then selected to compose the soundtrack, which he co-produced along with Craig Huxley
Craig Huxley
Craig Huxley is a Grammy nominee and Emmy Award-winning musician and producer who has been involved in a wide variety of entertainment-related projects since childhood. He began his career as a child actor, starring in hundreds of TV shows; perhaps his most notable roles were those of Captain...

. The soundtrack album was released by A&M Records
A&M Records
A&M Records is an American record label owned by Universal Music Group that operates under the mantle of its Interscope-Geffen-A&M division.-Beginnings:...

 in the United States.

Unlike many film soundtracks from the first half of the 1980s and before, the soundtrack for 2010 was composed for and played mainly using digital synthesizers. These included the Synclavier
Synclavier
The Synclavier System was an early digital synthesizer, polyphonic digital sampling system, and music workstation, manufactured by New England Digital Corporation, Norwich, VT. The original design and development of the Synclavier prototype occurred at Dartmouth College with the collaboration of...

 by the New England Digital
New England Digital
New England Digital Corp. , founded originally in Norwich, Vermont and eventually relocated to White River Junction, Vermont, was best known for its signature product, the Synclavier Synthesizer System, which evolved into the Synclavier Digital Audio System or "Tapeless Studio." The company sold...

 company and a Yamaha
Yamaha
Yamaha may refer to:* Yamaha Corporation, a Japanese company with a wide range of products and services** Yamaha Motor Company, a Japanese motorized vehicle-producing company...

 DX1. Only two compositions on the soundtrack album feature a symphony orchestra. Shire and Huxley were so impressed by the realistic sound of the Synclavier that they placed a disclaimer in the album's liner notes stating "No re-synthesis or sampling was employed on the Synclavier."

Andy Summers
Andy Summers
Andy Summers is an English guitarist born in Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire, England. Best known as the guitarist for rock band The Police, he has also recorded twelve solo albums, collaborated with many other artists, toured extensively under his own name, published several books, and composed...

, guitarist for the band The Police
The Police
The Police were an English rock band formed in London in 1977. For the vast majority of their history, the band consisted of Sting , Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland...

, performed a track entitled "2010", which was a modern new-wave pop version of Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra (which had been the main theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey). Though Summers' recording was included on the soundtrack album, it was not used in the film.

Comic book

In 1984, Marvel Comics
Marvel Comics
Marvel Worldwide, Inc., commonly referred to as Marvel Comics and formerly Marvel Publishing, Inc. and Marvel Comics Group, is an American company that publishes comic books and related media...

 published a 50-page comic book adaptation of the movie. It was adapted by J. M. DeMatteis
J. M. DeMatteis
John Marc DeMatteis is an American writer of comic books.-Early career:Born in Brooklyn, DeMatteis graduated from Midwood High School and Empire State College. He worked as a music critic before getting his start in comic books at DC Comics in the late 1970s...

, and illustrated by Joe Barney, Larry Hama
Larry Hama
Larry Hama is an American comic book writer, artist, actor and musician who has worked in the fields of entertainment and publishing since the 1960s....

 and Tom Palmer
Tom Palmer (comics)
-Biography:Although Palmer has done a small amount of pencilling work , the vast majority of his artistic output since the 1960s has been as a comic book inker...

.

Home media

2010 was first released on DVD (R1) in 1998 by MGM. It was re-issued (with different artwork) in September 2000 by Warner Bros.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., also known as Warner Bros. Pictures or simply Warner Bros. , is an American producer of film and television entertainment.One of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank,...

 Both releases are presented with the soundtrack remastered in Dolby 5.1 surround sound and in the original 2.35:1 aspect ratio, though a packaging error appears on the 2000 Warner release, claiming that the film is presented in anamorphic widescreen when, in reality, it is simply letterboxed and not anamorphic (the MGM version of the DVD makes no such claim). The R1 releases also include the film trailer and a 10 minute behind-the-scenes featurette "2010: The Odyssey Continues" (made at the time of the film's production), though this is not available in other regions.

The film was released on Blu-ray Disc on April 7, 2009. It features a BD-25 single-layer presentation with 1080p/VC-1 video and English Dolby TrueHD 5.1 Surround audio. The disc also includes the film's original "making of" promotional featurette (as above) and theatrical trailer as extras.

Reception

Critical reaction to 2010 has been mixed to positive, with the film holding a rating of 64% of Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...

. Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...

 gave 2010 three stars out of four, writing that it "doesn't match the poetry and the mystery of the original film" and "has an ending that is infuriating, not only in its simplicity, but in its inadequacy to fulfill the sense of anticipation, the sense of wonder we felt at the end of 2001". He concluded, however: "And yet the truth must be told: This is a good movie. Once we've drawn our lines, once we've made it absolutely clear that 2001 continues to stand absolutely alone as one of the greatest movies ever made, once we have freed 2010 of the comparisons with Kubrick's masterpiece, what we are left with is a good-looking, sharp-edged, entertaining, exciting space opera".

James Berardinelli
James Berardinelli
James Berardinelli is an American online film critic.-Personal life:Berardinelli was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey and spent his early childhood in Morristown, New Jersey. At the age of nine years, he relocated to the township of Cherry Hill, New Jersey...

 also gave the film three stars out of four, writing that "2010 continues 2001 without ruining it. The greatest danger faced by filmmakers helming a sequel is that a bad installment will in some way sour the experience of watching the previous movie. This does not happen here. Almost paradoxically, 2010 may be unnecessary, but it is nevertheless a worthwhile effort." Vincent Canby
Vincent Canby
Vincent Canby was an American film critic who became the chief film critic for The New York Times in 1969 and reviewed more than 1000 films during his tenure there.-Life and career:...

 gave 2010 a lukewarm review, calling it "a perfectly adequate though not really comparable sequel" that "is without wit, which is not to say that it is witless. A lot of care has gone into it, but it has no satirical substructure to match that of the Kubrick film, and which was eventually responsible for that film's continuing popularity."

Awards

Though it did not win, 2010 was nominated for five Academy Awards:
  • Best Art Direction
    Academy Award for Best Art Direction
    The Academy Awards are the oldest awards ceremony for achievements in motion pictures. The Academy Award for Best Art Direction recognizes achievement in art direction on a film. The films below are listed with their production year, so the Oscar 2000 for best art direction went to a film from 1999...

     (Albert Brenner
    Albert Brenner
    Albert Brenner is an American production designer and art director. He has been nominated for five Academy Awards in the category Best Art Direction.-Selected filmography:...

     and Rick Simpson
    Rick Simpson
    Rick Simpson is an American set decorator. He won an Academy Award and was nominated for another in the category Best Art Direction.-Awards:Simpson won an Academy Award for Best Art Direction and was nominated for another:Won* Dick Tracy...

    )
  • Best Makeup (Michael Westmore)
  • Best Visual Effects
  • Best Costume Design (Patricia Norris)
  • Best Sound Presentation (Michael J. Kohut
    Michael J. Kohut
    Michael J. Kohut is an American sound engineer. He has been nominated for seven Academy Awards in the category Best Sound.-Selected filmography:* Meteor * Fame * Pennies from Heaven * WarGames...

    , Aaron Rochin
    Aaron Rochin
    Aaron Rochin is an American sound engineer. He won an Academy Award for Best Sound and was nominated for eight more in the same category.-Selected filmography:Rochin won an Academy Award and was nominated for eight more:Won* The Deer Hunter...

    , Carlos Delarios
    Carlos Delarios
    Carlos Delarios is an American sound engineer. He has been nominated for four Academy Awards in the category Best Sound. He has worked on over 100 films since 1980.-Selected filmography:* WarGames * 2010 * RoboCop...

     and Gene Cantamessa
    Gene Cantamessa
    Gene Cantamessa was an American sound engineer. He won an Academy Award for Best Sound for his work on the 1982 Stephen Spielberg film, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial...

    )


2010 won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation
Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation
The Hugo Awards are given every year by the World Science Fiction Society for the best science fiction or fantasy works and achievements of the previous year. The award is named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of the pioneering science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, and was once officially...

in 1985.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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