At the end of the day these guys (and girls) are on a job, a rescue mission of sorts, but also and probably more so, another scientific investigation (dare I say mystery). Well I say grunts but in this movie the team on-board the ship are actually highly qualified astronauts and scientists, but the way they all interact with other whilst sitting around communal mess rooms or ship consoles does give off that same vibe. Indeed whilst watching the first half of the film you can easily see similarities to other famous 'grunts in space' type setups such as 'Alien'. Upon arrival the team must work out what happened to David Bowman, what happened to HAL, what the monolith is all about, and how Jupiter's moon of Europa figures into all this.

The US and Russia both cooperating together (despite political unrest) because the new ship Discovery Two is taking too long to complete and Discovery One is set to crash into Jupiter very soon. Chandra (Bob Balaban), Discovery One designer Walter Curnow (John Lithgow), and s selection of Russian astronauts. The team consisting of Heywood, HAL's creator Dr R.

A new mission is put together to go to Discovery One and find out what exactly happened. Floyd Heywood (Roy Scheider) being the head of the National Council for Astronautics at the time, was blamed for this disaster. Put simply, the mission to Jupiter by Discovery One in the original was a complete failure resulting in the apparent deaths of all astronauts under unknown circumstances, plus the large mysterious monolith is still drifting in orbit around Jupiter. So despite the first movies extremely deep, thoughtful and thoroughly scientific plot, this sequel is actually a lot more straight forward. Kubrick passed on the project, which was a mistake I think, instead giving Hyams the opportunity to take the helm, a grand undertaking if ever there was one. With '2001' established as a movie of grandiose proportions, Clarke began working on the sequel to his novel but making it a direct sequel to Kubrick's movie instead of his own novel, which was slightly different. This was mainly down to practical reasons with the movie, actually being able to film things, cost etc.Obviously in the novel Clarke was able to flesh out more content properly where as the movie merely hinted at things, or was more symbolic. Both he and Kubrick collaborated with each other over both of their works, ultimately each project did end up differing slightly. The original movie '2001: A Space Odyssey' was developed at the same time as Clarke was writing his novel (which was based upon one of his own short stories, 'The Sentinel').

Could Peter Hyams have chosen a bigger task?! Setting himself the challenge of making a sequel to, probably, one of the greatest science fiction movies ever made, which also had one of the greatest directors, brave man.

2010 arthur c clarke