INSTALLMENT 11:
In Which Nothing Terribly Profound Occurs

Let's see, now. Didn't I promise to say a few words about 2010 (MGM)? That was a while ago. Put on the side-counter warmer till I'd wrung myself dry in re Dune, by the way of explanation. Seems somehow moot now. But, as I said I'd say, I'll say so now.

2010 is a great deal smarter and more high-minded than the first reviews would have had you believe. For instance, a critic named Michael Ventura appraised the film in the L.A. Weekly under the headline 2010: A COMIC BOOK IS NOT A POEM. He didn't consign the movie to hell, but he said it wasn't the lyric icon Kubrick gave us; said he had trouble remembering the sequence of scenes; said it was devoid of that quality we might call "divine." Well, that's true.

And granted that once you get beyond the mystical trappings the plot is considerably thinner than 2001 (with which 2010 has been, and perhaps should be, inevitably compared), and the "philosophy" is homespun, it nonetheless seems to me that the most salient praise one can direct toward 2010 is that the film has a brain. It is about something.

In a year redolent with smarm—the clone grotesqueries of the sexually corrupt Hardbodies and Risky Business's ethically bankrupt popularity with filmgoers of all ages—a movie that attempts to say the universe does still contain wonders and intellectual uplift must be treasured. That ain't, as we say in the world of comestibles, chopped liver (a food of my people).

As one who has gone on record at obnoxious length about the inadequacies of director Peter Hyams, I hear the glinkety of your eyebrows lifting when I report that if there be substantive inadequacies in 2010, they cannot be levied against Hyams. He has directed with cool composure and high craft. And as one who has been friend to Arthur Clarke for more than thirty years, again I perceive furgling at my belief that the things-wrong with this film stem directly from Arthur's novel, a book I suggest never should have been written.

Ask Budrys to deal with that aspect of the matter. He's the book evaluator; I'm just the joe who goes blind sitting in dark rooms on your behalf.

For me, a sequel to something as remarkable as 2001 must not only answer the cosmic questions joyously left unanswered in the original, it must take me into equally as extrapolative places. 2010 attempts the former, and I'd rather have been left with my own suppositions. What was proffered as solution to the puzzle seemed rinkytink, commonplace, unmemorable.

Yet feeling the oppression of the sequel's inadequacies is very likely because one has the unrelenting drive to believe that all this massive machinery—$27 million in production and another $24 million for prints and advertising? that's what I think it was—must have been set in motion for some Deep Purpose; and when the payoff comes, the flashing lights and terraforming scintillate not in the glare of the memory of that star child floating toward Earth at the conclusion of A Space Odyssey.

There are nice, subtle, futuristic touches that the alert viewer remembers—one player's tie, collar and watch—Arthur feeding the pigeons from a park bench—but one comes away from 2010 with two impressions:

First, that it is a peculiarly earthbound film, returning from the wonder and mystery of that ebon slab floating in space to the mundane (by comparison) concerns of loved ones left behind, and terrestrial political squabbles. Literally, a bringdown.

Second, that Peter Hyams pulled off something of a small miracle. Given the book as basis, a story at best mildly innervating; and given the necessity to make the movie based solely on the Everest Principle ("because it's there"); and given that MGM's then-chief operating officer Frank Yablans needed a major vehicle to save his ass at the studio so the film was rushed into production; and given that Hyams at his top-point efficiency isn't Kubrick after a sleepless week; and given that the expectations of those who deify 2001 can never be fulfilled; it is something of a small miracle that 2010 is as intelligent, as inventive, as handsome as it is.

That it makes sense at all, given the above, is much to the director's credit. It earns him respect and a stay on the note of foreclosure that has haunted his previous films.

As of March 10th, 2010 had earned $40,700,000 in domestic box-office, with foreign and ancillary monies yet to come. It was a coup for Hyams. But it didn't save Yablans. Moneyman Kirk Kerkorian was "impatient" with the results and, as of March 13th, Frank Yablans (and later his entire cadre) was fired from MGM/UA Entertainment as President and Chief Operating Of ficer of MGM Films. And we just might lament that there ain't no justice; but with that slash of the scimitar of retribution heard by the drunk driver who doesn't get nabbed the first fifty times he runs a stop sign and takes a fall on the single occasion he's innocent of wrongdoing, the ever-watchful universe caught up with Frank Yablans for such offenses to the tender sensibilities of filmgoers as Monsignor.

Justice: swift and sure.

But 2010 is left to us as merely another movie that didn't quite make it.

ANCILLARY MATTER: Though my mandate in these essays is serviceable only when dealing with motion pictures (though one TV column will soon manifest itself for good and sufficient), I risk your wrath with advisement of an item usually beyond my purview, by use of the specious logic that it is visual in nature, and thus can be fudged into this space.

It is the latest book to be illustrated by the man his publisher calls "one of the foremost wood engravers in the United States." This is disingenuousness on the part of The University of California Press, because Barry Moser is to wood engravers as Lenny Bruce was to comedians, as Brother Theodore is to monologists, as Poe was to writers. If you have not seen his Pennyroyal Editions of Moby-Dick (1981), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (1982 & 1983) or Huckleberry Finn (1984), yours is an empty life, devoid of beauty or meaning.

Barry Moser's illustrations are exquisite beyond the telling. He soars at an altitude where only such wondrous birds of passage as Lynd Ward and Rockwell Kent have tasted the wind. The passion, craft and imagination of Moser's work have an impact that leaves the viewer speechless.

Thus, it is a visual event of considerable importance when Barry Moser illustrates Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein. Again in a Pennyroyal Edition designed by the artist, this 255 page large-size (8 ½? × 12?) interpretation of the 1818 text is the best $29.50 you will spend this year. Fifty-two chilling and unforgettable illustrations in black and white and duotone. A book you must not deny yourself. Such art as this is surely the reason we were given eyes.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction/September 1985