2010 - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of 2010 or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to 2010

[addison]

The anti-nuclear sign visible in widescreen when Arthur C. Clarke makes his cameo in front of the White House was an actual long-standing icon in Lafayette Park on the far side of the executive mansion, tended for years by an activist, and which grew in size by degrees over several years. The depicted version was an intermediate one. An even larger version was banished when all semi-permanent protest displays were banned from the park due to increased security concerns.

[aaron]

The voice of the S.A.L. 9000 computer was performed by Candice Bergen, though the role was credited to "Olga Mallsnerd", a pseudonym combining the surname of Bergen's spouse (director Louis Malle) and that of Mortimer Snerd, one of her father's (ventriloquist Edgar Bergen's) famous puppet characters.

[kristen]

Movie critic Roger Ebert wrote in his review of this film: "I felt that the poetry of "2001" was precisely in its mystery, and that to explain everything was to ruin everything - like the little boy who cut open his drum to see what made it bang." In spite of strongly disliking the idea of a sequel to Kubrick's masterpiece, Ebert considered 2010 a good movie in itself and gave it three stars out of four.

[ken]

Dame Helen Mirren's character Kirbuk, is essentially "Kubrick" spelled backwards, omitting the letter "C".

[ethel]

Roy Scheider and John Lithgow appeared in All That Jazz (1979).

[carla]

The blue spacesuit on the Discovery (the only one that was never used, in either 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or this movie) was used on Babylon 5 (1993) season one, episode twenty, "Babylon Squared" and season three, episode seventeen, "War Without End: Part 2"

[kenzi]

The following dedication appears at the end of the end credits: "For Chris, John, and Nick."

[melinda]

There were originally plans for two sequels to 2010, based on Arthur C. Clarke's remaining novels in his Space Odyssey series, '2061: Odyssey Three' and '3001: The Final Odyssey'. Tom Hanks was reportedly involved in these plans, but they never came to fruition. The Syfy channel announced an adaptation in 2016, but no concrete plans have surfaced since then.

[scarlett]

The Russian spacecraft named for Soviet Cosmonaut Alexey Leonov contained a drawing made by Aleksei Leonov.

[duane]

Helen Mirren's character in this movie is Russian, like many other characters she has played in other movies. Mirren has some Russian ancestry. Bob Balaban, in real life, does have Russian and Jewish ancestry from his paternal grandparents (during the University of Chicago computer lab scene, it's also his real-life home city and place of birth).

[frederick]

Arthur C. Clarke wanted Dr. Chandra to be played by Sir Ben Kingsley. Chandra is a Hindu deity, and Kingsley played the title character in Gandhi (1982). Additionally, one of Dana Elcar's children is named Chandra.

[bessie]

At the end of the movie, Jupiter explodes, caused by millions of alien monoliths, turning it in a new sun. In the original book, this sun is called "Lucifer", from the Latin "light-bringer". Appropriate, as it brings much-needed light to the new, developing life on Europa.

[wesley]

The first time we see the Leonov it flies across the screen in close up and the letters 'cccp' on the exterior of the ship are backward indicating the negative was reversed in the final print of the film.

[kim]

The blue spacesuit, a holdover from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), is missing its helmet, apparently because the producers thought that Dave used that helmet while trying to disable H.A.L. in the first movie. But Dave actually used a green helmet, part of a green spacesuit which was stowed in the emergency airlock.

[ruby]

This sequel to a Stanley Kubrick movie featured two actors who worked with Steven Spielberg: Roy Scheider from Jaws (1975), and Bob Balaban from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Spielberg later took over Kubrick's final project, A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001).

[carl]

The Russian ship "Leonov" was the inspiration for the look and feel of the Omega-class destroyers in Babylon 5 (1993).