2010

First of all—what a great World Cup final! Congrats to Argentina.

I rewatched 2010. Good film! I always enjoyed it. Terrific cast. Not the thought-provoking classic like 2001: A Space Odyssey, but a solid, big-budget “hard sci-fi” outing, beautifully mounted.

I remember the film dated quickly because of its depiction of the Cold War. Strangely, with the tension today between the U.S. and Russia, that seems to be relevant again.

But now I see the ending, with the second sun created out of Jupiter by the Monolith aliens (spoiler, haha) and I think...wouldn’t that extra light and energy totally destroy our environment? Talk about global warming!

Apparently, I am not the first to wonder this online.

David Shire’s mostly electronic score (produced with Craig Huxley) is something I’ve always liked, even if it is a bit grating, especially in the finished film mix.

Peter Hyams was very hands-on in manipulating the score during the film mix, dropping some channels so it was only part of the sonorities that were delivered—and I remember David was unhappy with the result.

I remembered right! Here is the vintage David Kraft interview with Shire from Randall Larson’s CinemaScore magazine. And the piece with Huxley.

The orchestral “New Worlds Theme” at the end is terrific:

But my favorite piece is actually the early music for Floyd (Roy Scheider) at home with his family—so tender and tasteful, even in a “cold” electronic setting:

Hyams has a long history of confounding his composers. See the two-part interview Jeff Bond and I did with him for our Outland CD (behind the paywall at FSMOnline): Part One and Part Two.

There was apparently a first score created for 2010, by Tony Banks of Genesis, which Hyams rejected. The sad story is here.

Banks reused his score for another project, and you can hear it online:

However, I can understand why Hyams would reject it: the harmonic idiom just isn’t right for sci-fi and space. It’s too “pop.” Shire very thoughtfully used late-romantic harmonic relationships that read as “space” and cosmic to us.

Well, that’s my life—thousands of movies online I’ve never seen, and I’ll watch 2010 for the sixth time. It’s got shots like this:

Come on, that’s cool—right?