2010 (1984)

I hadn't seen this in many years until it aired over the weekend on TCM as part of its Oscar programming (five nominations!), and found it to be surprisingly involving.

It would never be a rival of 2001 simply by virtue of being a completely different kind of film, but I liked the way Hyams took up the challenge and tried to shoot the picture with a painterly eye towards composition (like the master shots of the early conversation between Scheider and Dana Elcar on the satellite dish).

And there seemed to be a conscious effort to move away from Kubrick's efforts at dehumanization by casting innately ingratiating actors like Scheider and Lithgow and Elya Baskin (the poor man's Armin Mueller Stahl). Scheider especially makes a strong and warm central presence, and I like the way the movie plays to his underused strengths as an engaging lead.

In the end the film is reined in by its narrative, but Hyams gets a lot of mileage out of the well-worn tropes of the genre, like the astronaut leaving the mothership in a tiny pod or the final last-minute escape. It works. And even though the message is dated, if not corny, the movie never fails to entertain.

That's a fair point. One thing I like about Scheider is that he couldn't mask his blue collar-ness (I mean that in the best way). He had a street-wise quality that made it seem like he learned everything he knew from living and not from books. Makes it easy to like him but not necessarily to buy him as a bureaucrat scientist.

My favorite futurist touch: Dolphins in the living room. It's more amusing to me than anything. It always struck me as the kind of thing a 12 year old boy would dream up for his science fiction movie.

It's a testament to his work in the first film that it's an eerie moment simply to see "Douglas Rain" in the opening credits.

Speaking of voice work, that's a pseudonym-credited Candice Bergin as SAL 9000.