In the long-awaited sequel to "2001: A Space Odyssey," Roy Scheider is sent back into space on a joint mission with the Soviets to try to find out what happened on the original mission. An attempt to answer the many questions left at the end of the first movie regarding the fate of one of the astronauts, the HAL 9000 computer and the spaceship Discovery on their journey to explore Jupiter.

Now that enough time has elapsed since the release of 2010 for outraged 2001 fans to calm down, it can be seen that, while there was no decisive creative reason for Hyams' sequel to exist, it's not a bad movie.

A good-looking, sharp-edged, entertaining, exciting space opera.

2010 is not a bad movie by all means. Comparisons to the milestone that is 2001:A Space Odyssey, that I feel is Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece and sadly often misinterpreted, are inevitable. 2010 doesn't compare to 2001, but does a decent enough job on its own.

The special effects here are really quite good and still look great especially when captured so well by the great cinematography and lighting. The direction and script is efficient enough, the music is appropriately haunting and somewhat mysterious and the acting from Roy Schneider and John Lithgow is very good. Also while neither a strength or a weakness, 2010 is in some ways slicker and shorter than 2001, and the Black Monolith which still confuses a lot of people is elaborated upon here.

However, while the script has moments of thoughtfulness and efficiency, it also isn't as complex and mysterious with some of the voice over occasionally over-simplistic and also some of the dialogue could've have excised- the beauty of 2001 was that it wasn't about the story or dialogue but more the images, the meaning behind them and the music. The story certainly is interesting, but what hampers it is a certain over-explicitness that is rather banal on the surface, a really simplified religious ending and a lack of the epic sense and ambiguity that made 2001 so masterful.

All in all, an interesting film but it is also rather unnecessary as well. 6/10 Bethany Cox

It turned that 2001: A Space Odyssey was nowhere near the real 2001 when it finally rolled around. It is devilishly hard to predict the future, it's not the first or the last science fiction film to get it wrong. So with only one year remaining until 2010, the story of 2010 bares no resemblance in any way to the future described except in global tensions and those are of a different nature.

Nine years before Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood went into space with a spaceship operated by a computer with issues named HAL to investigate reported signs of life on one of Jupiter's moons. They never returned and their empty ship still orbits Jupiter.

The USA gets word that the USSR is sending a team to investigate the ship which is in orbital decay. They want American participation, but at the same time there is a growing war threat over in Central America where the Russians have a new surrogate government in Honduras.

The president's science adviser James McEachin persuades the man who sent Dullea and Lockwood to head the American team. Roy Scheider picks as his guys, John Lithgow and Bob Balaban. Balaban is the guy who invented and programmed HAL the computer which went haywire the first time.

The Russian team is headed by Helen Mirren before she played the Queen and before she was Inspector Jane Tennyson. They're all scientists, but her team and Scheider's are citizens of their respective countries. But being out in space forces a cooperation that the governments on earth can't seem to grasp.

The film comes up with a lot of answers for the questions that 2001 left including the reason for HAL's problems in the other film. HAL also gives this new group some reason for concern in this film.

2010 is more Arthur Clarke than 2001 one was which was Stanley Kubrick's own version of what Clarke wrote in the book the first film was based on. Here director Peter Hyams lets Clarke's more straightforward screenplay speak for itself. The end is a spiritual one, something truly wonderful does happen. It's even somewhat biblically prophesied if you think of a play on the words 'son' and 'sun'. And that's as far as I go in describing the climax.

2001 had the actors dwarfed by the spectacle. Here the actors have more to do and they uniformly do it well. Roy Scheider's character seems to be a harbinger for his character on Seaquest DSV.

I'm not a big fan of films where the story is sacrificed so I like the Stanley Kubrick film, but not to the degree others do. This film while operating in the parameters set by Kubrick has an identity all its own.

It might not be something wonderful, but it is something to think about.