How strange that Peter Hyams would be entrusted to do (write, produce, direct) the sequel to 2001. Admirers of the Kubrick movie cannot have taken heart in the reflection that Hyams had always seemed happiest in his movies when someone was chasing someone, and at top speed, too. And in truth, 2010 turns out to be a bit bleak to look at (Hyams takes credit himself for the photography); but that seems par for the course in spaceship movies, as with prison and hospital movies. The larger truth is that the sequel doesn't disappoint. Much of the credit, presumably, should go to Arthur Clarke, who wrote the short story on which the first odyssey was based, then wrote the novelization of the film script, and now has been good enough to write a followup himself before any of the circling vultures could do it. The Cold War microcosm set up aboard a joint Soviet-American space mission to investigate the floating derelict, U.S.S. Discovery, while the Cold War down below heats up over some Central American impasse, is in the finest s-f tradition: a contemporary reality carried to a logical extreme. And on the way to a very traditional 1950s-ish admonitory/inspiratory ending (Clarke, it will be remembered, has been writing science fiction since the Golden Age), there are plenty of plot hooks to pull you in and along. That cryptic last transmission from the previous voyage — "My God, it's full of stars!" — is turned over and over to see if it will yield any meaning. Traces of chlorophyll, a sure sign of organic life, are detected on one of Jupiter's moons. Keir Dullea, last seen adrift in space in embryo form, begins to reappear to his old acquaintances with the manner and message of a Jehovah's Witness: "Something is going to happen. Something wonderful." And the official state of war declared on Earth forces the two teams of scientists to go to their separate vehicles: the Russians to stay aboard the ship that got them there, the Americans to retreat to their reactivated Discovery.. The rewards for biting on these hooks are several sequences of torturous suspense, and without anyone chasing anyone. Roy Scheider, John Lithgow, Helen Mirren. (1984) — Duncan Shepherd