No director could ever have hoped to repeat the artistic achievement of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey; and nobody knew that better than Peter Hyams; who made this much more conventional film from the first of three sequel novels by Arthur C. Clarke. Whereas Kubrick made a poetic film of mind-expanding ideas and metaphysical mysteries; Hyams shouldn't be blamed for taking a more practical; crowd-pleasing approach. In revealing much of what Kubrick deliberately left unexplained; 2010 lacks the enigmatic awe of its predecessor; but it's still a riveting tale of space exploration and extraterrestrial contact; beginning when a joint American-Soviet mission embarks to determine the cause of failure of the derelict spaceship Discovery. Having arrived at Discovery near the planet Jupiter; the American mission leader (Roy Scheider) and his Russian counterpart (Helen Mirren) must investigate the apparent failure of the ship's infamous onboard computer; HAL 9000; as well as the meaning of countless mysterious black monoliths amassing on Jupiter's surface (an interpretation Kubrick originally left up to his viewers). Meanwhile; Earth is on the brink of nuclear war; and an apparition of astronaut David Bowman (Keir Dullea) appears to repeatedly promise that "something wonderful" is about to happen. --Jeff Shannon