Since one of America’s traditional New Year’s Day pastimes is vegetating on the sofa and watching really bad movies as you recover from a brutal night of partying, this New Year, consider tracking down a copy of 2010, the movie. Sure, you can watch the world end in 2012 in 2010 (March 2nd, to be precise), but why not watch a world begin when a movie ends now? Those last few sentences will make total sense if you watch the movie. I experienced a profound disappointment when 2001 rolled around, and we weren’t using e-ink to read magazines or riding Pan Am shuttles to an orbiting Hilton as depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I’ve since adjusted. But I was a little curious as to how the movie 2010 had depicted the future. To their credit, they got a couple of things right (mostly by avoiding showing many everyday devices) but in other ways they were way off. Yes, Jupiter’s moon Europa may have life, and governments still lie and cheat and manipulate scientists’ gullibility, but in the film they still have the US and Russia in a cold war, teetering on the edge of nuclear conflict because of a blockade on Honduras. Who’d have guessed that just five years after the movie was made, the Berlin Wall would come down, and an era of Glasnost would begin? The everyday technology they *did show in the film was a little hit or miss in terms of accuracy. The laptop Roy Scheider’s character uses on the beach isn’t too far off, but the only desktop monitors in the film look sort of like bulky 70′s TV’s that have been restyled by Apple (which is, in fact, probably what they are). The arrival of a thinking, talking computer is still years away in real life (except our artificial intelligence program here on Dissociated Press) so it was perhaps appropriate that the one in the film is the size of an antique china buffet. And it was a little preposterous that the scientist in the movie rebooted the original HAL 9000 in minutes; I’ve spent longer waiting for XP to boot after a crash! All in all, the film is a mixed bag, with some decent acting, scripting, and shooting (although the cinematography looks almost childish in comparison to Kubrick’s 2001) that suffers a bit from 80′s overtones. The counterpart computer to HAL, for instance, is a girl named SAL; scientist Heywood Floyd’s house has dolphins swimming around in indoor pools, and there’s an overall feeling of having borrowed props from the Alien set. But this is just the perfect thing to watch on the sofa with a screaming hangover!

The laptop in the movie wasn’t too far off from today’s laptop…

…but the desktop looks like a 70′s TV. At least the AI computer on the right is the size of a refrigerator; that just might be possible before you and I are dead.

It’s hard to believe this guy rebooted a computer that you can float inside faster than Windows reboots. But on that note, I’d be happy to wait for Windows to do its crashy thing if I could do it in zero G.