It turns out that 2010 is on YouTube so I am revisiting it. I happen to have seen it well before watching 2001, thanks to TV broadcasts. It's not a great movie, but it was how I learned about HAL 9000 for the first time. (Then I read Clarke's book, then I read The Lost Worlds of 2001, and only after all that did I eventually watch the Kubrick movie.) ~Chara
I think pi may have a good point with 2010: 2001 may be regarded as the enigmatic masterpiece but 2010 is good and straightforward and—most importantly—there's some actual emotional depth. Neither Kubrick nor Clarke were the best with that stuff.
~Chara
a slight discontinuity between 2001 and 2010, although it's purely through subtext: Kubrick depicts Heywood Floyd as a smarmy bureaucrat and while the movie doesn't explicitly finger him as the one who decided to use HAL 9000 for some tedious spy games that backfired, the implication is clear enough: it's Floyd himself who appears in the recorded message to talk about the "security reasons" behind using HAL to conceal the real purpose of Discovery's mission. Clarke softens Floyd considerably in 2010 and Roy Scheider completes the job of transforming the sinister space manager into an honest scientific administrator. ~Chara