The People’s Space Odyssey: 2010: The Year We Make Contact.
I’ve never known anyone as passionate about science fiction movies as Larry Klaes. His features on films ranging from The Thing from Another World to 2014’s Interstellar have proven hugely popular. Today Larry looks at Peter Hyams’ 2010: The Year We Make Contact, a film with (and this is putting it mildly) big shoes to fill. How did 2010 measure up to its illustrious predecessor, and what choices did Hyams make that confirmed — or contradicted — Stanley Kubrick’s vision in 2001: A Space Odyssey? Have a look at what Larry considers a flawed but nonetheless valuable take on Arthur C. Clarke’s angle on the cosmos, complete with numerous pointers to online nuggets that fill out the story of the film’s production.
by Larry Klaes.
When the science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered in theaters in early April of 1968, it created a stir with cinema-goers and critics which has seldom been seen before or since.
An experimental art film with an unheard-of budget for its day – 10.5 million dollars, or over 74 million in 2020 dollars, adjusting for inflation – 2001 (for short) confounded expectations for its genre and the modern cinema in general.
Now I know that ten million dollars or even 74 million dollars must seem like pocket change to audiences of the early Twenty-First Century when it comes to a standard big film budget. In those days before fancy computer-generated special effects and top actor salaries that measure in the tens of millions of dollars per film, however, this was a lot of money for a big studio to spend on a single film – especially a member of the science fiction genre and an "artsy" one at that.
I can recall those quaint days of 1995 when the general public and the media flipped out about the aquatic science fiction film Waterworld costing over 100 million dollars. This reaction only escalated when the film turned into a critical and financial flop. Now major products of Hollywood easily cost hundreds of millions of dollars and are expected to generate at least one billion dollars or more in revenue. This may help to explain why 2001 was considered such a gamble for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in the late 1960s.
2001 ’s scope and scale were truly epic: Nothing less than the evolution of humanity, from its humble beginnings four million years ago on the plains of Africa to a future with orbiting nuclear weapons platforms, space shuttles, giant wheeled space stations, complex lunar bases, nuclear-powered manned missions to Jupiter, truly artificial intelligences (AI), and the discovery of a highly advanced extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) that has been guiding the progress of our species all along.
However, 2001 did not follow the standard path for the vast majority of science fiction cinema. Much of the film relies on visuals over verbal or written explanations: This is a predominantly visual medium, after all.
As for its audio, the soundtrack seldom provides the audience with direct cues as to how they should react to a scene. In fact, Director, Producer, and Co-Screenwriter Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) scrapped the film’s original music by Alex North (1910-1991) just before its premiere and replaced it with the temporary music used as a sort of placeholder during production.
While this was a shocking act, especially to the score’s composer – who did not learn that his music had been changed out until seeing 2001 on opening night – Kubrick’s brash decision turned out to be a very wise move. North’s music was certainly professional and well done, but it was written for a more expected type of science fiction film, which 2001 certainly was not.
Most importantly, 2001: A Space Odyssey left plenty of mysteries for its audience to ponder:
What is that big black slab doing among our primitive apelike ancestors and why are they suddenly acting so much more aggressive after huddling around it? How and why did an ancient bone thrown into the air suddenly seem to turn into a futuristic space satellite? Why is that big black slab we saw in Africa four million years ago now on the Moon, and buried under its surface in the bright ray crater Tycho, no less?
Why did the smart talking computer with the one red "eye" and the soothing voice onboard that big, long Jupiter-bound spaceship named Discovery suddenly decide to start bumping off its human crew? Why is there another big black slab circling the gas giant planet this time? Why and how did surviving astronaut David Bowman suddenly appear in some crazy kaleidoscope-style situation just moments after we saw a space pod leave the Discovery ?
Now Bowman is in some kind of fancy windowless apartment with a spacious blue bathroom, where he keeps seeing older versions of himself for what seems like every few minutes! Now he is a very old man lying in a bed in that same apartment – with yet another big black slab at the foot of his bed. Is it the same one we saw way back in space and time?
Suddenly Bowman transforms on the bed into what looks like a large fetus inside some transparent egg-shaped shell. Now the large fetus has somehow left the fancy apartment and is in space hovering over a planet that looks a lot like Earth. The fetus appears to turn towards the audience as the powerfully dramatic music from the opening of 2001 plays and… the end credits begin.
As you might imagine, the film left many audiences proverbially scratching their heads in confusion. That 2001 was also deliberately slow paced with "action" scenes that went counter to what viewers had been fed by film studios for decades only added to their frustration. In addition, with one major exception, all the featured characters were purposely written to be bland and two-dimensional at best. Apparently walking out in the middle of a screening was not atypical audience behavior.
Certain self-appointed film critics had similar reactions. A few were adept and open enough to realize they were witnessing a landmark event in cinematic and cultural history, but many others were simply left as confused and frustrated by 2001 as the general populace. They also had a tool, or perhaps a weapon in certain cases, which most people did not possess when the film made its premiere: Public forums to spread their views far and wide via newspapers, magazines, radio, and television.
Their initial reactions were either high praise or withering criticisms. It was easy to tell who was ready and aware for something different in science fiction cinema and who was disappointed at having their long-entrenched expectations subverted – and on such a large scale as a very expensive film from a major Hollywood studio with high-quality special effects.
Eventually, many would come around to genuinely appreciate they were witnesses to a literal cultural-changing event. Even those who remained unimpressed with 2001 still recognized and often admitted that they had been present at cinematic history.
Still, many remained confused by specific scenes to the point they were genuinely disturbed by the film’s deliberate ambiguity. They wanted Kubrick to explain them.
Although Kubrick did have reasons and answers for 2001: A Space Odyssey , he was more than reluctant to reveal them, as he rightly assumed it would subvert the art he created. As the director said in an interview with Playboy magazine in their September, 1968 issue:
"How much would we appreciate La Gioconda [Mona Lisa] today if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas: ‘This lady is smiling slightly because she has rotten teeth’ — or ‘because she’s hiding a secret from her lover’? It would shut off the viewer’s appreciation and shackle him to a reality other than his own. I don’t want that to happen to 2001 ."
The other cinematic "sin" of the genre Kubrick committed was not showing the alien beings who made the big black slabs, or the Monoliths as they are called. He did intend to show these extraterrestrial intelligences (ETIs) early in the making of the film, but the various efforts he and his production team made to create believable-looking living aliens did not pan out. Kubrick also intended for the first ten minutes of 2001 to consist of various contemporary scientists talking about extraterrestrial life. The interviews were filmed but not included in the final film.
Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008), the other writer of the 2001 screenplay and the subsequent novelization, consulted with astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan (1934-1996) on how to represent the ETI in the film. Sagan suggested that evolution dictates life forms developing on other – and therefore presumably quite different – worlds would likely not resemble organisms found on Earth. Therefore, it would be better to suggest their existence rather than show them directly and risk looking quite outmoded should any real aliens ever show up.
The result was the Monolith, the main instrumentality and representative of the aliens. Nearly featureless and possessing enigmatic abilities and motives, it was an ingenious way to present an intelligent galaxy-spanning species far in advance of current humanity with the philosophy of "less is more." This thinking was also the key to the game-changing success of 2001: A Space Odyssey .
Nevertheless, while some folks enjoy a sense of cosmic ambiguity and being presented with mysteries to solve, many others prefer to be told directly what they are witnessing, be it in a science fiction film or the much wider canvas of reality in general. This is why so much of our entertainment, whatever form of medium it may take, is often what I will politely term to be "generic" in theme, plot, structure, and design.
Also Sprach… the Sequel.
So perhaps it was only a matter of time that an answer to this call would happen in the form of a sequel to 2001. In 1982, Clarke produced the novel titled 2010: Odyssey Two . Taking place approximately one decade after the events in the first film, Clarke was strongly inspired by the amazing discoveries made by the twin Voyager deep space probes of the gas giant planets Jupiter and Saturn and their retinue of moons and rings during their historic flyby missions of these worlds between 1979 and 1981.
As Clarke stated in the Author’s Note of his novel:
"No one could have imagined, back in the mid-sixties, that the exploration of the moons of Jupiter lay, not in the next century, but only fifteen years ahead. Nor had anyone dreamed of the wonders that would be found there – although we can be quite certain that the discoveries of the twin Voyagers will one day be surpassed by even more unexpected finds. When 2001 was written, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto were mere pinpoints of light in even the most powerful telescope; now they are worlds, each unique, and one of them – Io – is the most volcanically active body in the Solar System."
Image : The first edition cover of Arthur C. Clarke’s science fiction novel 2010: Odyssey Two , published in 1982.
With one set of questions answered – the Galilean moons – the novel went on to answer many other issues left off in the first film, although the first novel had its own set of answers when it wasn’t heading off in its own directions.
A film version of 2010: Odyssey Two was perhaps inevitable. Kubrick had no interest in making a sequel to his masterpiece, or any of his other films, for that matter. Supposedly he had even ordered the sets, props, and design diagrams of 2001 destroyed so they would not find their way into perhaps lesser science fiction films.
Reuse was the fate of many of the props, models, and costumes from another science fiction cinematic classic, Forbidden Planet (1956), though their multiple uses in the original episodes of The Twilight Zone television series from 1959 to 1964 are an important and honoring exception – not to mention fun to watch for.
However, I have since learned of another story that the film studio wanted the props removed as they were taking up storage space for newer films. This might explain why the large model of the iconic wheeled Space Station V ended up abandoned in some back lot to fall victim to decay and vandalism, rather than being outright demolished from the start. A deeply unfortunate end for these cinematic treasures, whatever the real story is regarding their demise.
Peter Hyams (born 1943) took on the daunting task of making a theatrical sequel to one of the greatest science fiction films of all time. Two years after the emergence of Clarke’s novel, Hyams completed this task and called the result 2010: The Year We Make Contact .
Many of the main ambiguities of 2001: A Space Odyssey were answered. But were they the "right" answers? Or was 2010 more about Hyams wanting to make what I am going to call a 2001 "comfort food" version for the masses? Is this good or bad? Just like the real food one consumes, it depends on the quality and quantity, not to mention the tastes and the moods of the recipients.
A full description of 2010 arrives next in these pages. I highly recommend for those of you reading this essay who have never encountered the sequel before that you stop here now and view the film first, if you do not want to be besieged with multiple spoilers up ahead. Or perhaps you have seen 2010 before, yet you would like or need a refresher. You may also want to pick up Clarke’s novel for similar reasons, as that work will be an integral part of this discussion.
While I am at it, you may also want to do the same for the film and novel versions of 2001 for an even more complete picture, as many details from that first part of the Space Odyssey saga will be discussed quite a bit for what I hope are obvious reasons.
My God, It’s Full of…
We begin our cinematic journey of 2010: The Year We Make Contact with a summary of the first film splayed out across the screen in an antiquated and noisy computer text scrawl while relevant still images from 2001: A Space Odyssey appear in the background.
Watch the opening sequence for 2010 here:
Image : The theatrical poster for 2010: The Year We Make Contact . It is ironic that the Star Child from the end of 2001 is so prominent here and in other promotional material for this sequel, as we shall learn.
Among the things we are told from what turns out to be a report filed by Heywood Floyd, Chairman of the National Council on Astronautics (NCA), dated December 9, 2001, which were neither shown nor stated in the original film:
HAL 9000’s "malfunction" began as the USS Discovery approached Jupiter’s two innermost Galilean moons, Europa and Io. In the cinematic 2001 , one gets the impression that these events actually took place in interplanetary space after the spacecraft emerged from the Main Planetoid Belt, but well before their arrival at the Jupiter system. In the 2001 novelization, Discovery ’s destination is the next Jovian planet out from Sol, the prominently ringed world of Saturn. This is based on earlier script drafts, which is often all that Clarke had to go on while writing the novel. However, the story goes that the film’s special effects team led by Douglas Trumbull was unable to create a visually convincing set of rings for the gas giant world, so the vessel was retargeted for Jupiter. Yes, Jupiter does have its own set of rings, but they were unknown until Voyager 1 imaged them in early 1979, as they are quite thin and dark in comparison to Saturn’s magnificent collection of countless circling water ice particles. The Monolith/Stargate is sitting at the LaGrange point between Io and Jupiter and is nearly two kilometers (1.2 miles) in length. The USS Discovery is orbiting Io. The last transmission Bowman sent before plunging into the Monolith/Stargate aboard a Discovery space pod was his exclamation of "My God, it’s full of stars!" This statement was written in the 2001 novelization by Clarke, but never said in the film version. As if to make up for its lack of existence in the 2001 film, we will hear the recording of Bowman saying this phrase multiple times throughout 2010 . One gets the feeling that the makers of 2010 were uncomfortable with long silences; I say this only half facetiously. FYI: The actual full phrase Bowman said in the 2001 novel is this from the end of Chapter 39 titled "Into the Eye": "The Eye of Japetus had blinked, as if to remove an irritating speck of dust. David Bowman had time for just one broken sentence which the waiting men in Mission Control, nine hundred million miles away and eighty minutes in the future, were never to forget: ‘The thing’s hollow – it goes on forever – and – oh my God! – it’s full of stars!’"
The summary does contain one big, glaring error which appears early on in the crawling baby blue text: The Monolith is said to be located in the Sea of Tranquility, even though it is then referred to as the Tycho Monolith!
The Monolith on the Moon was indeed found in Tycho crater, but this bright-rayed impact scar is not located in the Sea of Tranquility: Rather, Tycho is deep in the lunar southern hemisphere on the side of the Moon that faces Earth.
Image : This image of the southern hemisphere of the Moon from the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) Web site for February 6, 2020, displays the craters Tycho and Clavius. The latter is the big oval-shaped impact with four smaller craters splayed across its interior in a line. This is where Clavius Base is located in 2001. Tycho is the smaller, more circular crater below Clavius, with a prominent mountain peak in its center. From Earth during the Moon’s phases on and around full, the multiple rays emanating from Tycho stand out quite well. Note that the Sea of Tranquility is nowhere to be seen in this photograph.
The first manned mission to land on the Moon, Apollo 11 , took place in what is formally known as Mare Tranquilitas in July of 1969, so perhaps this is what and where whoever actually wrote the dialogue was thinking of. Nevertheless, this is something that should have been caught and corrected in the editing process, if never made to begin with. That the error stayed in the film, and in the very introduction at that, is bothersome, especially since this is a fact that could have been easily checked, even in the "primitive Internet" year of 1984.
In this fictional world of the Space Odyssey saga, Floyd visited the Tycho Monolith in person and was present when the alien artifact sent that ear-piercing signal towards Jupiter, so Floyd certainly should have known that its location was nowhere near the Sea of Tranquility when writing his report.
Once this report with its annoying dated computer sounds end, the iconic music that so famously introduced 2001: A Space Odyssey to the world, Also Sprach Zarathustra , begins.
As the music continues, we slowly fade into the always impressive sight of the Very Large Array (VLA), a very real collection of 27 radio telescopes situated in the New Mexico desert. Inaugurated in 1980, the facility was renamed the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in 2012 after undergoing a major system upgrade. Jansky (1905-1950) is considered one of the founding figures of radio astronomy, a field which did not come into prominence until well into the Twentieth Century.
FILM FACTS: Director Hyams told Clarke that he wanted to film this opening scene at the Arecibo Radio Observatory on the island of Puerto Rico to parallel the same opening scene in the 2010 novel. However, Hyams changed his mind after visiting the place in 1983 when he saw how “truly filthy” the one thousand-foot-wide dish was.
This event is documented in The Odyssey File , authored by Clarke and Hyams (Del Rey, 1984), where the two corresponded via email on computers about the 2010 film just before the director started production. 2010: Odyssey Two is also the first novel Clarke wrote on a computer, the Kaypro II.
A later science fiction film which did utilize Arecibo as a set piece, Contact (1997), managed to solve the "filth" problem by digitally removing much of the accumulated dirt and grime from the aluminum plates that cover the giant dish, which were first installed in 1974. Apparently, such CGI technology was unavailable in the early 1980s, or perhaps simply too expensive?
As another relevant factoid, when the Arecibo radio telescope was upgraded with those plates for better signal reflectivity, the observatory celebrated the event by commissioning and sending a three-minute radio transmission to the globular star cluster Messier 13, located 25,000 light years from Earth in the constellation of Hercules.
Best known as the Arecibo Message of 1974, the greetings and information package left our planet via the radio antenna for M13 on November 16 of that year. If we are lucky to have some alien species located in that star cluster who can intercept, translate, and respond to our METI, or Message to Extraterrestrial Intelligence, we will need to wait about 50,000 years to receive their reply.
Disappointed with the conditions at Arecibo, Hyams then paid a visit to the VLA, which as we see in the film’s opening, obviously passed muster with him. FYI, Contact also filmed at the New Mexico observatory. In this case, the VLA was much more than just window dressing: The radio dish cluster served as the instrument which detected signals coming from an advanced interstellar society via one of their monitoring and relay stations circling the star Vega.
If you would like to know a lot more about Carl Sagan’s Contact, see here:
I also happen to like this informative tribute page to the film, which includes quite a bit on the VLA while Contact was filming there in September of 1996:
A figure in a dark brown business suit approaches the tall and gleaming white dishes of the VLA, dwarfed by their size. Upon one of those radio telescopes is a middle-aged man wearing sunglasses, a dark brown jacket, and beige shorts: This is Dr. Heywood Floyd, who is in the middle of cleaning a section of the antenna struts. Dr. Floyd’s comparatively diminutive figure is almost lost among the metal latticework of the imposing astronomical instrument.
The visitor turns out to be a Soviet scientist named Dr. Dimitri Moisevitch, who begins his conversation with Dr. Floyd by telling him (and thereby the audience) what his government knows about his recent past: How as Chairman of the National Council on Astronautics (NCA), Floyd was held responsible for the loss of the USS Discovery during its mission to Jupiter nine years earlier and subsequently became a university chancellor.
After a brief mention that the Cold War is still going on in this version of the year 2010 and is heating up in Central America, Moisevitch asks Floyd for two minutes of his time to play a game called The Truth, wherein both men will only tell each other the truth, rather than be coy, silent, or just plain lie due to the geopolitical differences between their two nations, the United States of America (USA) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
Image : Floyd and Moisevitch conducting some Cold War strategy on the "set" of the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico.
Moisevitch reveals that he knows the Americans are building Discovery 2 to travel to Jupiter and find out what happened with its predecessor and in particular its "brain", the AI known as HAL 9000, which was supposed to be "foolproof and incapable of error." However, the Soviets already have their own manned interplanetary vessel, named after the first human to perform an Extravehicular Activity (EVA), or spacewalk, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov (1934-2019). Its construction is much further along than the Discovery 2 .
"I thought you were gonna call it the Titov ?" asked Floyd, regarding the second human to orbit Earth aboard Vostok 2 in August of 1961. "We changed last month. People fall out of favor," replied Moisevitch.
The Soviet scientist notes that the Leonov will reach Jupiter and Discovery almost one year before the Americans can. The problem is, their mission team is not familiar with HAL 9000 and would require months to reactivate the computer and decipher its data. The Soviet officials are also concerned that what happened with the first Discovery crew might also happen to the members of the Leonov .
QUESTION: Do these fictional Soviets have their own equivalent of HAL 9000? Or SAL 9000, as we shall see. They never say in the film and we see no evidence for any "smart, thinking" computers aboard the Leonov . I find it hard to believe in the competitive atmosphere of the Cold War, fictional or otherwise, that the Soviets would not have tried to make their own version of HAL, or at least attempt to steal it. The history of that era shows both sides tried to best each other in many arenas, especially technology.
COMMENT: In our world of 1984, the year when 2010 premiered in cinemas, the USA had the Space Shuttle (more officially known as the Space Transportation System, or STS) that could carry seven or more human passengers and tons of supplies and equipment into low Earth orbit. In 2011, the Space Shuttle program was cancelled. Since then "those poor Americans" have had to get their astronauts space rides from the Russians on their Soyuz vessels. This situation is going to change quite soon, though, thanks to the private space sector.
Moisevitch also expresses his frustration that the American government "has been very selfish and stupid" in keeping to themselves the Monolith discovered in the lunar crater Tycho and subsequently transported to Earth. Wanting to know what has been learned about the big black slab, Floyd replies they have found "nothing. It’s impenetrable. We’ve tried lasers, nuclear detonators. Nothing worked."
Having set up the current situation regarding the key players and factors, the Soviet scientist then lays out the dilemma and a potential solution:
"Here we have our quandary. We are going to get there first, yet you have the knowledge to make the trip work. How much more time do I have?"
Responding with a growing agitation borne by the realization of what Moisevitch is offering, Floyd grants the scientist an extension of "game" time and asks how he could convince his government to allow Americans to join the Leonov crew.
"It won’t be easy," Moisevitch replies. "However, I’m pretty good. A Russian craft flown by Russians, carrying a few poor Americans who need our help. That also doesn’t look too bad on the front page of Pravda ."
In contrast, Floyd is uncertain if he can convince his "people" to let some Americans hitch a ride on a Soviet spacecraft, adding that "they wouldn’t mind seeing you go and fail. They wouldn’t mind that at all. But carrying Americans? I don’t think they would allow that if they didn’t have to. They don’t have to."
Moisevitch counters with the cryptic question: "Have you checked Discovery ‘s orbit lately?"
Floyd declares they have been checking the spacecraft’s path in space circling Io and wants to know what Moisevitch is getting at. Feigning the potential for an asthma attack from the surrounding desert climate, the Soviet scientist starts walking away from Floyd and the VLA, saying only that his American counterpart is "a smart man" who "will know what to do" once he checks the orbit of the derelict Discovery .
Floyd rushes back to what I presume is the VLA control center and checks the orbit of the American space vessel on a computer with a very large and bulky monitor. What the former NCA Chairman discovers leaves him stunned and the audience in a state of wonder.
The big secret, as we discover in the next scenes, is that the USS Discovery ’s orbit is decaying faster than thought and no one really knows why, though some suspect the Monolith may be the real mechanism involved.
QUESTION 1: Why was Discovery put in orbit around Io? Why not the Galilean moon Callisto if it had to be anchored somewhere in the Jupiter system? This farthest satellite of the group is the only major Jovian moon orbiting outside the planet’s deadly radiation belts and is geologically stable so far as we can tell.
In 2001 , the Jupiter Monolith appeared to be floating among the major Jovian moons rather freely, so shouldn’t any of these natural satellites have worked? If so, why embed the ship so deep in these belts? The characters do acknowledge the intense and deadly radiation outside the Leonov when they send a team to reactivate Discovery , so this is not an astronomical fact the filmmakers were either unaware of or ignored.
Of course, the primary cinematic answer is that of the four Galilean moons, Io and Europa are the most exciting in terms of creating drama for 2010 . As said earlier in this essay, they are in fact the reason the novel and film sequels to 2001 came about in the first place, thanks to the Voyager probe flybys in 1979.
Ganymede and Callisto, despite being large and fascinating moons in their own right (at 5,268 kilometers, or 3,273 miles, in diameter, Ganymede is the largest satellite in the Sol system, even bigger than the planet Mercury; the moon also has the only known satellite magnetic field and probably its own water ocean way below its ice surface), do not quite possess that certain "star" appeal (or is that moon appeal?) which their smaller siblings have in spades, if such a thing can even be said about real alien moons.
Europa has a global ocean of liquid water perhaps sixty miles deep under an icy crust that is relatively smooth and has many long cracks but few impact craters: This gives the moon a potential for major forms of life unprecedented elsewhere in the Sol system as was known in the early 1980s. At the time, Mars was the more-or-less major contender for harboring extraterrestrial natives; after Voyager , the paradigm shift to the outer planets’ moons was rather swift and has only increased ever since, thanks to later discoveries in the Saturn system by the Cassini probe, particularly regarding the moons Enceladus and Titan.
When it comes to sheer potential drama and danger, it is hard to beat Io’s continually erupting system of volcanoes combined with a wild and colorful surface that includes entire lakes of molten sulfur – and perhaps underground reservoirs of the stuff, or even an entire subsurface sulfuric ocean! However, I think 2010 dropped the ball when it came to visually depicting Io as "a violent moon, even for Jupiter," as Floyd would state later in the film. I will discuss this issue in more detail later on in this essay.
QUESTION 2: What do the Soviets have that the Americans do not which makes them better at learning that Discovery ’s orbit around Io is decaying? Monitoring satellites in Jovian orbit? Something more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) somewhere in space or on the Moon? Were the Soviets just paying more attention because they are sending an urgent manned mission to Jupiter? Yes, the Americans were also going to Jupiter with a human crew with their Discovery 2 , but since they apparently thought the first Discovery was not going anywhere except in a literal circle, they were not rushing the construction of the second ship.
The information about the decaying orbit could not have come from Discovery itself, as that vessel was essentially dead and definitely not transmitting. In the 2001 novel, Bowman left the ship running to monitor the Saturn system for as long as possible, continuing "to perform its duty, broadcasting instrument readings back to Earth until there was some final, catastrophic failure in its circuits."
In that scene in the 2001 film when Bowman leaves Discovery in the second space pod just before the Stargate sequence, we see there is no light coming from the bridge windows. He may have shut off any unessential systems while he was not onboard to conserve fuel and instruments, being the only crewman left. However, there may have been an additional reason, according to the novel…
When Bowman left the ship to investigate the Monolith, he secretly had no intention of coming back one way or another. Bowman figured that even if he did return safely from investigating the alien artifact to the main vessel, either a vital ship’s system or his sanity would give out long before the Discovery 2 would ever arrive to rescue him. The astronaut could not even rely on the ship’s hibernation system for survival, as it required HAL to maintain the life support equipment – and he had removed the AI’s higher brain functions in order to survive.
Floyd’s quick retort to Moisevitch when the Soviet scientist asks the American if he has checked Discovery ’s orbit lately – "You know damn well we’ve been checking it…. What is it you’re not telling me?!" – seems to be an honest reaction of surprise tinged with more than a hint of concern. Perhaps what Floyd meant was that they were checking Discovery ’s orbit around Io, but in terms of computer modeling more than actual monitoring.
Later on, when Floyd meets privately with his friend, the current NCA Chairman Victor Milson, to tell him about the spacecraft’s decaying orbit, Milson’s response of "how could we be so goddamn wrong about the orbit?" also gives one the impression that the Americans were depending primarily on what their modeling computers were telling them about Discovery , while the Soviets were probably relying more on direct observations of the vessel, since their chief Cold War rival was likely not inclined to just provide them with such data about one of their own ships – especially one that had been on a mission with secret orders to investigate a large alien artifact.
ONE ANSWER: In the 2010 novel, little useful direct information is provided about the precise methods that either side is using to track Discovery at Jupiter. I found this rather odd considering how much technical detail Clarke often went into on all sorts of subjects during the story. However, there is a mention that the United States Government cut funding for this monitoring activity, thus giving us at least one plausible explanation as to why the Soviets knew what was going on with the American vessel, but not the actual nation that built and launched it into interplanetary space.
Now, logically, it would be foolish and even dangerous for United States officials not to know where Discovery is at any specific time and place in space when the Americans want to send their own mission there with Discovery 2 . However, that a national government would do something penny wise and pound foolish is sadly quite plausible in either reality, especially if they are embroiled in a major conflict like the Cold War. That the film later states the sitting President is both reactionary and only interested in space in terms of using it as the ultimate military High Ground against the Soviets adds further evidence to the American funds and technologies for monitoring a derelict spaceship way across the Sol system being used elsewhere.
Speaking of the above…
The scene switches to the exterior of the White House in Washington, binary options D.C., where Floyd meets with Victor Milson, the man who replaced him as NCA Chairman. Sitting on a bench in Lafayette Park, we learn from Floyd that Discovery is going to crash into Io in just "two, two and a half years," far sooner than predicted.
Milson asks how they could have been so wrong about the spacecraft’s orbit, to which Floyd replies that they were not wrong, that "something incredible is happening up there. Discovery ‘s being pulled towards lo. Or pushed away from Jupiter. Whichever. Sometimes it seems to be accelerating, and other times it just seems to stop. I’ve never seen anything like it." Floyd suggests that the giant Monolith circling Jupiter may have something to do with Discovery ’s bizarre behavior.
Floyd asks Milson to convince the current Commander-in-Chief occupying the Oval Office – a "reactionary" President who wants to place the NCA, which is apparently their reality’s equivalent of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), under the jurisdiction of the Department of Defense (DoD) to assist in the growing Cold War – to procure seats for three Americans aboard the Soviet spaceship Leonov .
Despite Milson’s imagined response by the President to such a request during their upcoming meeting – "Enough with the crazy scientists spending all this money trying to talk to Martians," he quips – the head of the NCA listens to Floyd’s choices to join the Soviet mission to Jupiter:
The first candidate Floyd names is Walter Curnow. Considered the most expert engineer when it comes to Discovery ’s systems – he is in the middle of working on Discovery 2 – Curnow is probably the best individual who can get the non-functioning vessel reactivated in short order. The second man Floyd picks is himself.
"We lost some good men up there, and I sent them. I have to go," Floyd explains to Milson. He also throws in the selling point that "the Russians are gonna go aboard Discovery with or without us. Ask him if he wants them to have all the answers." A few moments later in their conversation, Floyd adds that Milson should tell the President "we’re screwed if we don’t go. Tell him, if we do go, we’ll lie – give the Russians false information. Tell him that. He’ll love that." Milson concurs in general.
The third choice is a man named Chandra, the designer of the HAL 9000 computer model, the most famous of which is now over 400 million miles from Earth in an unknown state. Floyd knows that Chandra is their best choice for reactivating HAL and figuring out what went wrong on that mission to Jupiter. Milson comments that he thinks Chandra is HAL and then asks Floyd if he trusts the man. Floyd replies that he does not, but they have no other real choice if they want to fix HAL and learn the truth about what happened out there nine years ago.
FUN FACT: While Floyd and Milson are chatting away on that park bench in front of the White House, there is an elderly man in a long gray coat feeding the pigeons in the park on a nearby bench on the far-left side of the screen. That fellow is none other than Arthur C. Clarke making a cameo appearance in 2010. As we will see later, this will not be the only time the author makes an appearance in the film based on his novel.
Image : Look who is feeding the pigeons outside the actual White House during the scene with Floyd and Milson.
We then get to meet this R. Chandra as he enters his office at the University of Illinois in Urbana. In the novel, he is known as Dr. Sivasubramanian Chandrasegarampillai, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana. However, in the film, Chandra is not of Indian descent but rather a white American man played by actor Bob Balaban (born 1945).
COMMENTARY: Hollywood has had a long habit of casting roles meant to be played by people of a particular ethnicity with Caucasian actors, usually because the pool of white folks has always been larger in the film industry and also because those in charge felt that largely Western audiences would be more "comfortable" with white actors in larger roles. While this practice has been generally reversed in the last few decades, it is obvious that the people in charge of 2010 made the conscious decision not to hire an Indian actor for the role of the computer expert, yet paradoxically they kept part of his decidedly non-Western last name.
Thanks to the wonderful 2010 blog I found while researching on 2010 for this essay, I have some actual answers to why Chandra’s original ethnicity was changed between the novel and film. The following paragraphs are quoted from a 1984 interview article in Starlog Magazine . They show that Balaban and the film crew were certainly aware of the issues in turning the Chandra character non-Indian. Their reasons for doing so, however, leave something to be desired:
"Balaban’s character, Dr. Chandra, has been slightly [!] recrafted in the translation to the screen. ‘They changed his nationality from Indian to American,’ he says. ‘Since there were Americans and Russians together up there, they thought it would be confusing to have another nationality thrown in there. That makes sense to me.’
“’I would like to have played an Indian,’ he adds, ‘although Indian people, and rightly so, would have resented that casting. I thought, in essence, the screenplay maintains his devotion to HAL and his affection for HAL. That was the most important part of the character.’
"Balaban had the opportunity to see how the screen adaptation fared with Clarke when the author visited the 2010 set at MGM Studios in Culver City, California.
“’I was glad he came on my last day of shooting,’ the actor admits. ‘I was nervous that he might observe me playing Chandra and think, ‘No, no, no, that’s not my idea of Chandra at all.’ I expected to be intimidated by him. But, he turned out to be a very funny, droll person. Here was this very accessible man, charming and kind, and I thought he was great.’”
The full interview is here:
In the novel, Chandra is definitively Indian. His heritage is not just some tacked on trait that was otherwise left alone; it is an integral part of who the character is. Author Clarke spent a good part of his adult life as a resident of the island nation of Sri Lanka (formerly known as Ceylon), just off the coast of India, so he was quite familiar with their cultures. However, with all due respect, Clarke was also a white Englishman, not a native Indian or Sri Lankan. One also must wonder if the author would have had any real say or pull with the filmmakers if he had insisted that the character be played by an actual Indian, especially in the early 1980s.
FYI: The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) has this historical tidbit to say on the subject of casting Chandra:
"Arthur C. Clarke wanted Dr. Chandra to be played by Sir Ben Kingsley. Chandra is a Hindu deity, and Kingsley played the title character in Gandhi (1982). Additionally, one of actor Dana Elcar’s children is named Chandra."
Kingsley’s father is Indian (his mother is English). Dana Elcar played Dr. Dimitri Moisevitch.
Would the viewing audience really have found it "confusing to have another nationality thrown in there," as Balaban claims the filmmakers said, even in that backwards era circa 1984? After all, it is not like we got to know more than a few members of the Russian crew very well. I sincerely doubt having one main character who was neither American nor Russian would have thrown the cinema into confusion and anarchy.
Hollywood was quite obviously more interested in a contemporary Western science nerd type, for which Balaban fit the bill for more than once in his career in such other science fiction films as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1978) and Altered States (1980). As we have seen all too often these days, real widespread sensitivity to other cultures, religions, gender issues, and various social ills are only now having their effective start of being acknowledged and addressed. Before then there were some genuine efforts, but mostly they were experiments and token appeals. When Indians and other "ethnic" types were chosen in that era, they often became comic-relief sidekicks to the main white characters.
Had 2010 been made now (perhaps called 2020: Odyssey Two or 2020: The Space Odyssey Continues ), Chandra would undoubtedly have been played by someone of actual Indian descent, possibly even an Indian woman. Undoubtedly Clarke and the filmmakers patted themselves on their early 1980s-era backs for having a woman as the commander of a spaceship (Captain Tanya Kirbuk of the Leonov ), but the only other women we see in 2010 don’t do much on screen except come to Floyd for reassurance and support, despite being professionals in their chosen fields.
For the record, women in 2001: A Space Odyssey did not fare any better culturally: The majority were minor characters in service roles, either preparing and delivering food or acting as glorified greeters to their male superiors. Ironically, the one woman portrayed as a scientist in the film – a radio astronomer just returning from the Moon after spending three months "calibrating the new antenna at Tchalinko" – was a Soviet citizen whom Floyd met only briefly on Space Station V for some polite conversation.
It has been noted how people (read most often men) can imagine all sorts of technological innovations when it comes to predicting the future of human civilization, but somehow the traditional roles of men and women do not move forward or change in the same manner. As always, progress on all fronts most often occurs in small steps.
Now back to our plot…
We find that Dr. Chandra has a companion who shares his office, an AI named SAL 9000. This computer version has a distinctly female voice courtesy of actor Candice Bergen (born 1946), who is oddly credited in the film as Olga Mallsnerd, and a blue-colored eye lens in contrast to HAL’s distinctive red camera eyes, or visual sensors.
FYI from IMDB on the name Olga Mallsnerd: "The voice of the S.A.L. 9000 computer was performed by Candice Bergen, though the role was credited to ‘Olga Mallsnerd’, a pseudonym combining the surname of Bergen’s spouse (Director Louis Malle) and that of Mortimer Snerd, one of her father’s (ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s) famous puppet characters."
Chandra talks with SAL about HAL’s "anomalous behavior" and how the mysteries of his malfunction cannot be solved without more information. SAL says that Chandra should be the one who goes to Discovery to learn what went wrong. Chandra tells SAL this plan may happen much sooner than expected. The computer scientist also reveals that he hopes to restore HAL to his normal functioning while out there.
However, Chandra is also concerned that "there may have been irreversible damage, certainly major loss of memory" to his favorite Artilect. To diagnose HAL properly, Chandra says he will first need to disconnect some of SAL’s circuits, in particular those of her higher functions, just as HAL had his memory circuits removed by Dave Bowman. Chandra would then reconnect SAL’s circuits to study what subsequent effects this computer brain surgery might have on her mind.
While SAL says she is "unable to answer that without more specific information" regarding Chandra’s query if removing those parts will disturb her, the AI then asks if she will have dreams while this mental dismantling and rebooting goes on. Chandra replies that "of course you will dream. All intelligent creatures dream. Nobody knows why. Perhaps you will dream of HAL… just as I often do."
We then switch scenes to visit with Heywood Floyd and his family at their beautiful and undoubtedly very expensive home in Hawaii, which comes complete with two dolphins who visit them via a swimming pool connected to the Pacific Ocean. The family is eating and chatting at the dinner table, where we learn that Floyd’s wife, Caroline, is a marine biologist who is presenting a lecture at an upcoming meeting. Their young son, Christopher, is more interested in feeding the dolphins than himself.
Floyd lets his wife and son know that he will leaving on the Leonov for Jupiter in just four months. Caroline does not take the news very well at first, but later resigns herself to the fact that this is the only way her husband will be able to exorcise his guilt over the losses from the first Discovery mission.
As the next few months pass, we get scenes of Christopher asking his father various questions about aspects of the mission, which is the film’s way of explaining the space travel depicted in 2010 to the audience. Although we do not see Floyd’s family again once he leaves for Jupiter until the very end of the film, their existence continues to play a role in explaining events to the film viewers.
FUN FACTS: The laptop Floyd uses on the beach scene with his son is a real laptop of the day (circa 1984), the model Apple IIc. The device is a bit clunky looking by today’s standards, or even in our version of the year 2010, for that matter. However, having a portable computer that can be taken just about anywhere is certainly a fact of our modern world.
Ironically, this laptop contrasts with the "futuristic" desktop workstations we see throughout the beginning of the film, which have monitors alone that could probably cause serious injury if they ever fell upon someone.
Although folks of all stripes circa 1984 knew that computers were only getting smaller and yet more powerful since the first such machines were developed in the late 1940s, the 2010 production crew apparently thought making their monitors the metaphorical size of a Buick was a progressive step in the right direction. Even more ironic, the graphical and text displays we see on these giant monitors do not seem to have advanced beyond the era that the film was produced.
To learn more about the Apple IIc shown in 2010, read here:
As for the other items with Floyd during the beach scene, there is a copy of Omni magazine with an image of the Jovian Monolith on the cover, stamped with a big red question mark. Unfortunately, Omni did not quite make it to the real 2010: The print version of this popular science-level publication had its last issue in 1995, becoming only available online. The magazine officially ended completely just two years later, in late 1997.
It also seems the film predicted that by 2010, beer would come in containers similar to the cardboard types for milk, judging by the crumpled example among Floyd’s laptop and Omni magazine. As of 2020, that alcoholic beverage is still mass produced inside of cylindrical aluminum cans. In addition, Budweiser still exists as a beer-producing corporation, a fact which cannot be said for several other big companies in the Space Odyssey saga.
COMMENT: Should Floyd, as a responsible father, be drinking beer and become distracted with work while he is supposed to be watching his young son on the beach? Did he learn nothing from his stint on Jaws ?
At the risk of killing this joke through explanation, actor Roy Scheider (1932-2008) played Police Chief Martin Brody in the landmark 1975 film Jaws about a giant rogue great white shark that terrorizes a fictional New England island community one summer. His character has two young sons, one of whom has a much too close for his comfort encounter with the main fish just offshore.
Sadly, not once does Scheider’s character say “You’re gonna need a bigger spaceship!” during 2010 . I mean, the Jupiter Monolith is almost two kilometers in diameter, after all.
FILM FACT: The automobile seen during the Heywood and Christopher Floyd exposition scenes is real and not some dressed up prop: A Ford Probe IV concept car released in late 1983. It was planned to serve as the model for the upcoming Ford Scorpio in Europe and the Ford Taurus for the United States two years later, but budget issues kept these Ford models from becoming more futuristic looking.
The 2010 blog goes into detail on the Ford Probe IV here:
INTERESTING RELEVANT SIDE NOTES: The only times an automobile is shown in both 2001 and 2010 also has Floyd being present in those scenes. For 2001 , a futuristic car is seen in the entertainment video Floyd was watching during his flight aboard the Orion III space shuttle. Well, he was asleep while this program was on in the background – or is that the foreground from Heywood’s perspective? As with 2010 , the filmmakers went with a real concept car designed by General Motors.
This page summarizes some of these "futuristic" items from 2010:
It is amusing how the rather brief beach scene contains so much in terms of futuristic items to compare and discuss – and how dated most of them became so relatively soon thereafter. Often, predicting the future is more of a crap shoot and art than science, even when the latter is dutifully employed. This statement applies just as much to 2010 ’s parent film. At least here, 2010 tried to present itself as being in the near future in a subtle and plausible manner. The makers do deserve credit for showing a laptop as a standard part of Floyd’s work equipment.
Now back to our film plot summary already in progress…
In a scene no less visually jarring than the transition from animal bone to space satellite in 2001 – if perhaps not nearly as heavy with symbolism – 2010 suddenly goes from the scene with a departing Floyd staring at his sleeping son Christopher one last time to the Soviet vessel Leonov moving through interplanetary space.
A dark gray and bulky spacecraft with no streamlining aesthetics whatsoever, the Leonov ’s middle section tumbles to create artificial gravity for the crew. This feature also avoids having the filmmakers develop awkward-looking and expensive floating effects for the cast as would have been required for a microgravity environment. At least some form of pseudoscientific artificial gravity a la Star Trek and countless other science fiction films involving futuristic spaceships was not incorporated.
As Floyd told his son in those exposition scenes back on Earth, he and the other two American passengers on the spacecraft, Curnow and Chandra, have been in artificial hibernation during the two-year journey through the void to Jupiter. Floyd is awoken first because the Soviet crew has found something quite interesting on Jupiter’s moon Europa. They are but two days away from the Jovian system.
COMMENTS: The hibernation system for the human crew aboard the Leonov looks very different than the one Discovery utilized. Film aesthetics aside, is this due to Soviet and American hibernation technology taking different design approaches? Or does this reflect over a decade’s worth of advancements since Discovery was built? Or a combination of both possibilities?
The 2010 novel contains nothing substantial regarding hibernation technology, although there was some discussion about participants not dreaming in that state. Were they trying to make some kind of connection with HAL/SAL dreaming while they "slept" and humans doing the same, or not, while in stasis, in terms of intelligence/consciousness/awareness and mental activity while in some form of slumbering?
Speaking of dreaming, I got the impression the filmmakers were using all these dreaming references in an effort to make some metaphysical statement about consciousness being beyond the merely physical, but somehow it never quite gelled: This is ultimately a good thing, considering that 2010 is a science fiction film, after all. Yes, the alien technology and its abilities represented by the Monolith are so advanced beyond human capabilities that they might seem to operate in the realm of magic to us, but that does not mean they are actual supernatural magic.
Remember, it was Clarke himself who made the famous comment about the possibility of advanced ETI technology being so sophisticated that it could be construed as having supernatural powers to mere talking primates with car keys such as ourselves.
Onward with our story…
Floyd and the Soviet crew sit around the ship’s Ward Room table to examine the printouts of the "strange data coming from Europa" encountered by Leonov ’s Chief Science Officer, Dr. Orlov, during their remote scans of the natural satellite.
Image : The Soviets and American members of the Leonov in one of several meetings in the Ward Room.
However, it quickly becomes obvious that Floyd’s mission counterparts are being less than forthcoming about this "strange data" coming from the icy Galilean moon. The two groups play a verbal dance where Floyd tries to gleam some useful meanings from this intriguing information while the Soviets keep telling the American to look at the data in his hands.
They also pepper the conversation with updates on the Cold War, which has only gotten hotter in the last two years since they left Earth ("the problem in Central America is growing worse…." and "the United States is threatening a naval blockade"), to emphasize why they are under orders to do little more than allow Floyd and his compatriots to observe along with reviving the Discovery and HAL 9000 "…because that is United States territory," explains Captain Tanya Kirbuk (spell or pronounce her last name backwards).
However, Floyd is having none of this:
"Listen. Just because our governments are behaving like asses doesn’t mean that we have to. We’re scientists, not politicians."
Kirbuk adds that she is also an "officer of the Soviet Air Force," but Floyd continues to press them about the data, where he finally learns that the Leonov crew has detected the presence of chlorophyll on Europa, which is moving at "one meter per minute… towards the Sun."
Kirbuk declares that they are going to send an automated probe down to the alien moon to investigate this phenomenon, to which Floyd replies a bit obnoxiously, given the verbal sparring he has just gone through, with a singular "Good!"
The Europan probe is soon jettisoned from its berth in the Leonov towards the moon. The robot explorer’s appearance is described thusly in a film script draft:
The probe is a jumble of mylar for a body… a high-resolution camera for an eye… a radio dish for a scalp… two flat solar panels splayed outward for arms… and a pair of impressive legs that are neatly tucked inward.
We cut back and forth between scenes of the probe descending to Europa’s icy landscape and the Leonov crew monitoring both its flight status and the data being sent back to the main ship. As their proxy explorer closes in on its target, it detects both chlorophyll and oxygen located in an unnamed crater. The excited crew aims the probe towards the impact feature.
Image : The Leonov ’s probe heads towards the icy, jagged surface of Europa, where it just starts to find something very interesting before suddenly being destroyed.
As the probe beams its floodlights into the crater, the images it returns start to show a distinct region of green – on a world otherwise colored with shades of white, gray, brown, and shadows! The Leonov crew attempt to get closer to this discovery, when suddenly a brilliant ball of white light flashes out from Europa where the probe was operating and moves away at incredible speed towards Jupiter.
Onboard the Leonov , all the monitor screens that were displaying Europa images and data now only show static. It is evident that their probe was either destroyed or at least knocked asunder by… something.
The Leonov crew and Floyd convene back in the Ward Room to discuss what just happened. We learn that all the telemetry from the probe was somehow erased, including on the backup recording device. The Soviets blame this data loss on "an electrostatic buildup of some kind."
The crew is also divided on whether they witnessed some kind of life form in that Europan crater. They consider sending a second robot probe to investigate, but Captain Kirbuk notes that it will be more difficult as the Leonov is moving away from Europa towards Io and they cannot slow down the ship without losing too much of their vital fuel supply.
Dr. Floyd has a different view on the whole matter, quoted in full below:
Floyd: "It wasn’t any [electrostatic] buildup."
Kirbuk: "Oh, really, Dr. Floyd? And just what do you think it was?"
Floyd: "A warning. Oh, there’s something down there, all right. We all saw it. We read the data. We know it’s there. But suppose, just suppose, that it had something to do with the Monolith? Now, before you get that look on your face, just listen to me for a minute. We’ve been sending probes out here since the ’70s. So have you guys. But none of us have ever encountered even the slightest signs of chlorophyll on any of Jupiter’s moons. Never. And we certainly were close enough, weren’t we? Nine years ago the Monolith was detected here. Discovery was sent up and everything went wacko. You catching my drift? Here we are, nine years later, trying to figure out what the hell happened and what the Monolith is all about. And guess what we discover along the way? The possibility of life of some kind where it never existed before. I don’t think it’s electrostatic anything. I think something wants us to stay away from Europa."
FUN FACT 1: In our reality, the Soviet Union never sent a probe to Jupiter or any other outer Sol system worlds; neither have the Russians as of 2020. They have had plans for mechanical explorers of Jupiter and Saturn going back to at least the 1970s, but an actual mission has yet to materialize. See here for the historical details:
FUN FACT 2: In the 2010 novel, published in 1982, there is a sentence where Clarke mentions "the Voyager flyby missions of the 1970s, the Galileo surveys of the 1980s, and the Kepler landings of the 1990s" in regards to earlier explorations of Europa (Clarke forgot to mention the very first flybys of Jupiter and its main moons by the space probes Pioneer 10 and 11 in 1973 and 1974, respectively).
The Voyager 1 and 2 deep space probes did indeed fly through the Jupiter system in 1979, with the incredible data and images they returned of the moon being the inspiration for the sequels to 2001: A Space Odyssey . The Galileo probe also became a reality, although due to numerous delays it did not leave the vicinity of Earth until late 1989 and did not arrive at Jupiter until December of 1995, where Galileo became both the first vessel to orbit the gas giant and drop a smaller probe into its dense atmosphere.
There was never a Kepler landing mission to Europa, although that name was used for an astronomical space telescope satellite mission that discovered thousands of exoworlds between 2009 and 2018. There are plans by both the Americans and Russians to further explore and land on Europa and perhaps the other Galilean moons, aimed for operation in the 2020s and 2030s.
COMMENT: The initial discovery of life on Europa in the film was handled very differently in the Clarke novel. The Leonov found itself in a race with a manned Chinese vessel named the Tsien which reached the icy moon ahead of the Soviet spaceship and made a historic landing on the surface.
They were the ones to discover Europan life first, but in a most unfortunate manner: A huge marine creature that was described by the surviving crew member named Chang in a desperate radio broadcast as both a mass of seaweed and a banyan tree covered with blue "buds" had been attracted to the Tsien ’s powerful floodlights and caused the lander to sink into the ice and become wrecked when the organism came up through the ice surface beneath the vessel to be near the lights. There was no way to rescue Chang in time and apparently the rest of the landing party had been killed when the Tsien was inadvertently sunk into the alien ice by the curious life form.
This entire subplot, dramatic and exciting as it was to read in the novel, was completely excised from the film. Unless the filmmakers had made 2010 into some kind of miniseries (which I think would work for the Space Odyssey saga), the side story would have been more of a detraction from the main plot, so in this case it was a wise call to make in a film only 116 minutes long with much to tell in that relatively short period of time.
A bit of legitimate snark here: As you may recall from the Bob Balaban interview I excerpted earlier, the 2010 filmmakers decided not to make the Chandra character Indian because they thought it would be "confusing to have another nationality thrown in there." No doubt adding a Chinese taikonaut into the mix would only have made things worse for those poor suffering circa 1984 audiences who were already pressed enough to grasp a science fiction story with real and realistic science, physics, and technology inspired both by recent real space discoveries and a complex art film released almost two decades earlier.
I must add that Clarke was prescient in having China portrayed as a big player in future space efforts. While they have yet