The movie begins with a “Mission Background”, which reiterates the first film, “2001: A Space Odyssey”.
In 1999 a rectangular object was found on the Moon in the Sea of Tranquility. The American astronauts who found it named it “Tycho Monolith”, and found it to be signaling towards Jupiter.
In 2001 the U.S.S. Discovery arrived in the vicinity of Jupiter. The flight crew consisted of Commander David Bowman (Keir Dullea), Co-Pilot Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood), three crew-members in deep hibernation to be awakened upon arrival, and the logic circuit HAL-9000, which malfunctioned during the approach to Jupiter’s largest moons, Europa and Io. Those in hibernation were killed, as was Poole. Bowman disconnected HAL, and then encountered another monolith, except this one was two kilometers long. He left Discovery to investigate, and his last transmission was, “My God, it’s full of stars.”
The Russian Dimitri Moisevich (Dana Elcar) approaches a satellite array where Dr. Heywood Floyd (Roy Scheider) is working and probes and pries in a manner designed to provoke anger and thus honesty. He wants to know what happened to Discovery (Dr. Heywood was in charge of that mission). Moisevich says Russia is preparing a rocket to go to Discovery to find out what went wrong, and so are you. But we will get there first, and if some of your scientists go with us the job could be easier. Heywood doesn’t like this guy, but he also doesn’t want HAL in Russian hands, so he goes to the head of the NSA and tells him to get the President to agree to their going – there would be three: Heywood, the guy who built Discovery, and the guy who programmed HAL. The discussion is a political one, with plans of how to tell POTUS, what arguments he would raise and how to counter them, and it all sounds amazingly current for a 34-year-old film. Guess nothing really changes, huh?
Dr. Chandra (Bob Balaban), who is going, has a new computer he calls SAL, and he wants to cut off some of her circuits to mimic what happened to HAL, and SAL agrees. Heywood goes home to his wife Caroline (Madolyn Smith), his son Christopher (Taliesin Jaffe), and his dolphin, and tells Caroline that a trip to Discovery is planned and he wants to go. She says okay because she doesn’t want him to attend her upcoming lecture.
Back at work Walter Curnow (John Lithgow) tells Heywood that HAL was programmed to lie to Bowman and Poole – he could not reveal the true mission (the monolith). Heywood says, “But I didn’t tell him to lie!” And Curnow hands him a directive from the White House that only the hibernated people were to know the mission. To run the ship HAL had to know, but he couldn’t tell Bowman or Poole, and that was against his Prime Directive, so he broke.
Well, whether that’s plausible or not, when the Russian ship is ready, they go. And among the others on board are Tanya Kirbak (Helen Mirren), and Maxim Brailovsky (Elya Baskin). And they get in trouble and have to devise a way to get away from Jupiter; the monolith doesn’t seem to like them much.
Exciting and suspenseful, though not necessarily logical (but when was the last science-based movie you saw logical?), it’s still a lot of bang for the buck with very good special effects and tense performances. And Commandeer Bowman (Keir Dullea) is in this movie!
“Thus Spake Zarathustra” by Richard Strauss, Original Music by David Shire, Based on a Novel by Arthur C. Clarke, Written for the Screen & Directed by Peter Hyams.
Bickering Critics 