The film version is flawed but still well-worth anyone’s time who got this deep in the thread & enjoys hard, near-future sci-fi.
My theory is that 2010: The Year We Make Contact is a lot like Blade Runner, pre- the various Ridley Scott re-cuts.
Drop the voiceover, tweak the ending to be less literal / sentimental, fix some of the FX matting, and you’d be left with one of the best serious SF films since 2001.
I enjoy both; 2010 is more an action piece wrapped with this period-specific visuals, coming also with burden of the real-world Cold War. While 2001 is a cinematic masterpiece that ended times of this naive pulp-scifi with its metal pointy rockets and damsel in distress tropes. The only thing I really really don't like the paint-psychodelic visual that Kubric used instead of Clarke's "Grand Central Station of the galaxy".
I really wish the remaining books would be turn into movies and so the Clarke-Baxter' A Time Odyssey series.
My theory is that 2010: The Year We Make Contact is a lot like Blade Runner, pre- the various Ridley Scott re-cuts.
Drop the voiceover, tweak the ending to be less literal / sentimental, fix some of the FX matting, and you’d be left with one of the best serious SF films since 2001.