I just watched
2010: The Year We Made Contact, a Ridley Scott production from 1984. It suffered the inevitable comparisons with Kubrick's
2001 and, I confess, it didn't have the breathtaking impact that the latter's special effects had. But in some crucial ways, it's a better movie. Besides resolving the question of what made the HAL computer go bonkers, it demonstrates how human succeed when they help each other get over problems, not when they compete. There's a scene where an American astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut have to make a tricky spacewalk from one space-ship to another. The cosmonaut helps the astronaut through a panic attack on the transit, but when they reach their destination, it's the cosmonaut who panics and is reassured by the astronaut. They succeed in the mission because they make up for each other's weaknesses. Later in the film, while their countries are at war back on Earth, they disregard their instructions to separate, and instead work together to avert a crisis of their own.
There's another incident where their spacecraft is undergoing severe turbulence in a maneuver that may be fatal. As another American straps himself down, a Russian cosmonaut slips in, and they silently hug each other for security. When the crisis is over, they part company. I love that scene. It's what we apes do when we're in trouble and need comfort, and it's what we've been doing ever since we started throwing bones into the air.
On another note, I watched David Lynch's
Dune and found that it still held up over the years. Looking on IMDB, I learned that what we saw in the theaters was a butchery of the footage that he'd shot for the film. The studio ruthlessly cut several explanatory scenes in order to shorten the movie, which would have fared much better if they'd made it a two-parter like the most recent one. It's one of those films where we can only speculate on what might have been. Like Once Upon a Time in America, what began as a great movie (which still survives in DVD format) was turned into an incoherent theater release in the US. Roger Ebert tells the whole story here:
