Even David Shire's mostly Synclavier score works.
I've never been much of a fan of electronic scores, but Shire's
2010 score was always an exception. I rather liked it, and I still have my LP of the soundtrack. Although my favorite part was when they finally brought in a full orchestra to do the end titles.
The science feels sound and I love the aero breaking sequence.
Well, they took a few liberties, like having gravity throughout
Discovery instead of only in the centrifuge. But mostly it was pretty sound. Movies with good science were much rarer back then than they have been in recent years, so that's always been something I appreciated about it.
I don't consider it dated at all. Just an alternate universe.
It's easier to see it that way when its setting is a dozen years in the past and it has to be taken as alternate history anyway. But back in 1991, it was still predicting a possible future, which made it kind of embarrassing that it had the USSR still around and Cold War tensions still 1980s-intense in 2010. (Admittedly, of course, our relations with Russia are pretty terrible right now in 2022, but Russia isn't the USSR.)
Of course, no science fiction writers seemed to predict the fall of the USSR. You can find any number of pre-1991 works assuming it would still be around centuries in the future.
Star Trek, for example, had Chekov mention Leningrad in "I, Mudd," and the
Tsiolkovsky in TNG's "The Naked Now" mentioned the USSR on its dedication plaque. It always intrigued me that out of all these writers who dedicated themselves to projecting plausible futures, as far as I know, not one of them pegged the USSR collapsing so soon and suddenly. It always seemed like it was too powerful for that.
And for the time it came out, it was a welcome "Screw those crazy guys up top" message.
Exactly. By trying to make it more topical at the time of its release, they made it less timeless. That's what I mean when I say it's dated -- it's blatantly a product of its time, which is incongruous for a story set decades in the future. I mean, every work of science fiction becomes outdated eventually, but the Cold War angle meant that
2010 (the movie) became outdated only 7 years after its release instead of 26 years after. The novel had a longer shelf life because it avoided Cold War politics, so the fact that the cosmonauts were technically Soviet was incidental and easier to shrug off.
