The 16-year wait between the 1968 opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the 1984 release of 2010 doesn’t represent the longest interval between a movie and its direct sequel (that distinction probably belongs to Gone With the Wind/Scarlett, although some would disqualify the pairing because the second installment was a TV mini-series). However, for fans of Stanley Kubrick’s inimitable science fiction classic, it was more than long enough. Even before one frame of 2010 was committed to celluloid, filmmaker Peter Hyams had accepted a huge challenge (the kind that many in Hollywood would find daunting): continue the story begun by Kubrick in a way that answered some of the questions without in any way cheapening the original.

As 2001 was Kubrick’s child, so 2010 belongs to Hyams, who took on four key duties: screenwriter (basing his script on Arthur C. Clarke’s novel), director, producer, and cinematographer. (For those keeping count, that’s one more hat than Kubrick wore.) Comparisons, however unfair, are inevitable. It’s impossible to craft a follow-up to one of the cinema’s most thought-provoking and impressive motion pictures without generating a litany of comments and criticisms. Based on published interviews with Hyams at the time of 2010’s release, he was well aware of the potential quagmire he had entered into, but his appreciation for the original was such that his greatest desire was for the sequel to do Kubrick’s film justice.

One question that arises is whether or not it is better to have seen 2001 before viewing 2010. For most two-part stories, this isn’t an issue, but this is not an ordinary situation. Those who have not seen 2001 will come to 2010 will some background deficiencies, but they will also not have any preconceived notions about style and tone. My guess is that these uninitiated viewers may appreciate 2010 more than stalwart 2001 aficionados because they will accept the second feature on its own terms. Kubrick’s shadow looms large over 2010 and the movie often seems to be struggling to escape from underneath it. The hypnotic quality that characterized 2001 is not present here; 2010 is a relatively straightforward space adventure story that extends the storyline but nothing more.

2010 picks up nine years after 2001. In the interim, not much has changed. The Discovery is still out near Jupiter – a cold, silent tomb for the disconnected HAL 9000 as it circles the planet in a slowly decaying orbit. The moon monolith has been brought from the lunar surface to Earth, but scientists are no closer to unlocking its secrets than they were a decade earlier. Meanwhile, both the Soviet Union and the United States are planning manned missions to Jupiter with the intention of exploring the monolith out there. The Russians’ space ship will be ready earlier, so it makes sense for a few Americans to be on board so that Discovery’s records and memory banks can be accessed. But tensions are high between the two superpowers as a crisis off the coast of South America escalates to where it could be the precursor to World War III.

Through a feat of diplomatic wizardry, politicians from both sides agree to allow three American scientists on board the Soviet space craft Leonov. Joining the Russian crew are Dr. Heywood Floyd (Roy Scheider), the former head of the space agency who blames himself for the Discovery debacle; Walter Curnow (John Lithgow), the engineer who designed Disovery; and Dr. Chandra (Bob Balaban), the creator of HAL. The commander of the Leonov, Tanya Kirbuk (Helen Mirren), is a stern, no-nonsense woman who is initially hostile to Floyd and his associates. However, in a time-honored tradition, as the Americans and Soviets work together to solve the mysteries of the outer Solar System, they form friendships and bonds of trust – even as the political situation between the two nations worsens.

During the course of the film, the solution to the riddle of the monolith is unveiled (although the aliens who created it remain an invisible presence). We learn its purpose and understand how this ties into the prehistoric version on Earth and the one on the moon. HAL is re-activated and rehabilitated, and we are given a somewhat unconvincing explanation about what precipitated his breakdown. (Conflicting orders caused him to turn paranoid and determine that the mission could be carried out without any human involvement.) Everyone is suspicious of HAL once Chandra turns him on again, but the computer proves to be helpful and self-sacrificing. Since HAL’s demise in 2001 represented that film’s emotional pinnacle, it’s nice to see the artificial intelligence get a second chance. Astronaut Dave Bowman (once again played by Keir Dullea), now a ghostly mouthpiece for the aliens, makes a cameo appearance – more, I suspect, out of a need to solidify the connection between 2001 and 2010 than out of any plot necessity. The message he delivers is important, but it could have easily been conveyed in another manner.

2010 ties up a number of loose threads, but it doesn’t resolve everything. The nature of the “star child” is untouched. And it’s still not clear how much responsibility Floyd bears for HAL’s psychosis. Despite the character’s protestations of innocence in 2010, there is evidence in 2001 that he may have known more than he’s letting on. 2010 doesn’t ask many new questions – it’s not that kind of movie – and the film ends with a straightforward, in-your-face moral. Oddly, the message of peace in 2010’s closing moments contradicts something from 2001, where the influence of the monolith leads man to his first act of overt violence.

A few of the casting choices are worth exploring. Obviously it’s nice to see Keir Dullea and hear Douglas Rain again. These two actors give 2010 the feeling of being in familiar territory. Roy Scheider has replaced William Sylvester in the lead role; Sylvester may have been the right age for the character in 2001, but he was too old (and probably too obscure) to re-create the part 16 years later. Scheider’s low-key but authoritative approach works for this script. The character is suposedly the same, but there’s little synergy between the two interpretations. John Lithgow, representing another name for the marquee, successfully keeps his manic tendencies in check. Helen Mirren would have been better if she hadn’t been required to sport a ridiculous Russian accent (one that makes her sound like Natasha from “Rocky & Bullwinkle”). And, for those who like trivia, Candice Bergen has small speaking part as SAL 9000 (HAL’s “sister”), although she uses the alias “Olga Mallsnerd” in the end credits.

Most of the space sequences are effective. While the Kubrick’s lethargic pace has been replaced with something more energetic, 2010 doesn’t speed along. There’s a lot of exposition, which means lengthy passages of dialogue, some of which are clever. (I liked Curnow’s observation that, while in space, he misses the color green. With no plant life in space or on the ship, there’s no green.) The visual effects are as good as, although not noticeably better than, those used in 2001. Perhaps the most impressive task of the special effects team was to re-create the Discovery much as it appeared in the earlier film.

In terms of sound and music, Hyams’ approach is completely different from Kubrick’s. No longer is space a soundless vacuum. Now, we can hear engines and other assorted noises. (Although Hyams gets around the thorny issue of whether we hear an explosion by staying within the confines of the Leonov when it happens.) And, with the exception of Richard Strauss’ “Also Spoke Zarathustra”, which plays over the opening and closing credits, Hyams relies upon an original score for 2010 rather than adopting Kubrick’s approach of applying classical music. (This is probably a good move; anything else would have seemed like a copy.)

2010’s biggest misstep is the Cold War backdrop (an element that was not contained in Clarke’s novel). An attempt by Hyams to make the film relevant to audiences viewing it 1984, the U.S./Soviet tensions circa 2010 now seem ill-conceived and out-of-place, especially considering that the USSR no longer exists. Granted, Hyams can’t be blamed for his inability to see into the future, but the movie’s reliance upon “current events” dates 2010 in a way that was never the case for 2001. It’s also a pretty tired plot element that has been done better elsewhere. Consider James Cameron’s The Abyss, which also employed alien intervention to urge peace between nations – that’s a case where the message folds nicely into the overall storyline, rather than seeming tacked-on, as it does in 2010.

Now that enough time has elapsed since the release of 2010 for outraged 2001 fans to calm down, it can be seen that, while there was no decisive creative reason for Hyams’ sequel to exist, it’s not a bad movie. The features form two largely independent aspects of the same story. Kubrick uses science fiction as a gateway to mystical meditation; Hyams uses it conventionally. Each picture is capable of being viewed separately (enough background is given during the opening sequence of 2010 to elminate the most obvious sources of confusion), although I’m not certain why anyone today would be interested in watching 2010 without having previously seen its more famous predecessor. (Incidentally, I expect interest in 2010 to increase early next year, after 2001 is re-released in theaters to celebrate real-time having caught up with the title.) For those who prefer a “double feature” approach, 2010 continues 2001 without ruining it. The greatest danger faced by filmmakers helming a sequel is that a bad installment will in some way sour the experience of watching the previous movie. This does not happen here. Almost paradoxically, 2010 may be unnecessary, but it is nevertheless a worthwhile effort.

The Arabian Oryx Sanctuary is an area within the Central Desert and Coastal Hills biogeographical regions of Oman. Seasonal fogs and dews support a unique desert ecosystem whose diverse flora includes several endemic plants. Its rare fauna includes the first free-ranging herd of Arabian oryx since the global extinction of the species in the wild in 1972 and its reintroduction here in 1982. The only wild breeding sites in Arabia of the endangered houbara bustard, a species of wader, are also to be found, as well as Nubian ibex, Arabian wolves, honey badgers, caracals and the largest wild population of Arabian gazelle.

The World Heritage Committee deleted the property because of Oman’s decision to reduce the size of the protected area by 90%, in contravention of the Operational Guidelines of the Convention. This was seen by the Committee as destroying the outstanding universal value of the site which was inscribed in 1994.

In 1996, the population of the Arabian Oryx in the site, was at 450 but it has since dwindled to 65 with only about four breeding pairs making its future viability uncertain. This decline is due to poaching and habitat degradation.

After extensive consultation with the State Party, the Committee felt that the unilateral reduction in the size of the Sanctuary and plans to proceed with hydrocarbon prospection would destroy the value and integrity of the property, which is also home to other endangered species including, the Arabian Gazelle and houbara bustard.

In August this year Filip Novokmet, Thomas Piketty, and Gabriel Zucman circulated a new working paper, “From Soviets to Oligarchs: Inequality and Property in Russia, 1905-2016” (NPZ 2017a, b). This paper makes several advances, including a novel estimate of the evolution of Russians’ offshore wealth.

To situate the subject briefly, Cold War scholarship has left us a substantial literature on income inequality under communism. Bergson (1944), Yanowitch (1963), Wiles and Markowski (1971), Pryor (1972), Wiles (1974, 1975), Wädekin (1975), Chapman (1977), McAuley (1977), and Matthews (1978), each made valiant attempts, sometimes extending to piecemeal comparisons over countries and over time. “Considering the obscure data with which they had to work,” a survey by Schroeder (1983) remarked, “Western investigators display a large degree of agreement.” Measured by the decile ratio, the distribution of official incomes in the Soviet Union was becoming more equal over time and was substantially more equal than in the developed market economies then available as comparators. Schroeder noted, however, that Western researchers could not access data on the Soviet distribution of illegal incomes, or on privileged distribution of goods and services including accommodation and health care.

More recently, Lindert and Nafziger (2014) made an advance in another direction, examining inequality in Russia before and after the Soviet era. They concluded that pre-tax income inequality in 1997, although likely understated by official reports, was greater than in 1904.

Finally, a new paper by Allen and Khaustova (2017) examines Russian real wages in the long run. This paper does not address income inequality directly but allows inferences to be drawn from comparing real wages and productivity in industry. They find that real wages stagnated from the 1860s to 1913 (in St Petersburg, the capital, and Kursk, a provincial centre) or showed modest gains (in Moscow) but lagged everywhere behind productivity, suggesting a movement from wages to profits and income from wealth. After the troubled wartime and revolutionary period, the 1920s brought large real wage gains. These were short-lived, evaporating in the famine-led inflation of the early 1930s.

Novokmet and co-authors (NPZ) are the first to have tried to measure wealth and income inequality in Russia over the whole twentieth century. And, as many readers will be aware, their paper is part of a much larger collaborative project, the World Inequality Lab and the associated World Wealth and Income Database, one that aims to measure inequality in many countries over hundreds of years.

According to NPZ, the share of the top 10 per cent in pre-tax income distributed to adults in Russia was 47 per cent in 1905. The share fell to 22 per cent in 1928, increased modestly to 26 per cent by 1956, and began to fall gently back again, reached a low of 21 per cent in 1980. (The Soviet-era years observed are 1928, 1956, and then roughly every second, third, or fourth year to 1988, when annual observations begin.) By 1996 the top 10-per-cent share had returned to the 1905 level and remained in that vicinity through 2016. NPZ comment: “our benchmark estimates suggest that inequality levels in Tsarist and post-Soviet Russia are roughly comparable. Very top income shares seem if anything somewhat larger in post-Soviet Russia.”

Measured by the top 10-percent income share, Russia today appears in the World Inequality Lab database in the same inequality band as the United States and China. Income inequality is reported as greater in a few countries: Turkey, India, South Africa, and Brazil. All north and west European countries that are represented in the database are more equal than Russia. But all are smaller than Russia in population, and a larger population will always tend to show greater inequality, because unequal economic outcomes are promoted by heterogeneity of all kinds, and heterogeneity is inevitably increasing in population size.

In its time the Soviet Union, in contrast, was apparently one of the most equal countries in the world. This is particularly striking, considering the large size of the Soviet population, 288 million by 1991. Other countries in the WID dataset with top 10-percent shares of 26 per cent or below at any time from 1917 to 1991 are few, and they are also much smaller in population: Australia, Denmark, Mauritius, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, and Taiwan. Of all these countries, only Italy’s population had reached 57 million by 1991, and Taiwan’s 20 million.

These results are broadly consistent with the earlier research described above. They confirm that income inequality in Russia after the Soviet era was comparable to before the Revolution, if not greater; that the distribution of Soviet official incomes was markedly more equal than in most market economies at the time and today, and in Russia beforehand and today; and that, within the Soviet era, inequality followed a modest Kuznets curve, rising, then falling.

Seen in this light, Soviet institutions and policies appear distinctly pro-poor. Before we take that as settled, however, there are three issues that point the other way.

First, in the Soviet era the poor might have gained relatively, but the chief factor in this was impoverishment of the rich. What the rich lost was not transferred to the poor, or was given only temporarily before the state grabbed it back, as clearly implied by Allen and Khaustova (2017). NPZ measure inequality by shares of income distributed to adults. In the Soviet era, the share of income not distributed to adults, but retained by the state, became unusually large. As a first approximation, household consumption fell from around 80 per cent of GDP in 1913 to around 50 per cent in 1940 and through the postwar period. By implication, what the rich lost was diverted into government administration and investment and defence projects; it was not passed on to the lower income strata. If there was an initial transfer to the poor, it was confined to the 1920s, and was then cancelled in the Great Breakthrough of Stalinist collectivization and industrialization.

Second, the Soviet state did not take only from the rich. It took also from the poor, including the poorest. This applied particularly in the years from 1928 to 1956, a period for which the NPZ dataset has only gaps. While I cannot find full explanation on this point, the NPZ dataset (like most Cold-War scholarship) seems to rely on reports of the distribution of official wage earnings to capture Soviet-era inequality. Wage earnings accounted for less than one third of Soviet household incomes in 1928, just over 60 per cent in 1937, and nearly 70 per cent in 1956 (Kashin and Mikov 2004: 17, 23, 34). The largest category of households excluded from reports of wage earnings were collective farmers – the great majority of Soviet farm workers – who received an uncertain dividend, not a wage. If that is the case here, then the rural poor are left out of account. (Forced labourers are also left out. There were millions of these from the 1930s to the 1950s. But they are a small omission compared with many tens of millions of collective farmers.)

Narrative accounts of rural food shortages and periodic famines indicate that rural poverty contributed substantially to Soviet-era inequality before the 1950s (e.g. Davies and Wheatcroft 2004). After that time, the compensation of collective farmers moved gradually, but never completely, towards public-sector standards.

Finally, as NPZ acknowledge, under Soviet arrangements, persistent shortages and privileged distribution decoupled consumption inequality from income inequality. In the Soviet Union everyone had an income, but not everyone could spend it on the same terms. A privileged class of insiders – the party elite and the employees of key production and service establishments – who had access to relatively high-quality goods and services at prices fixed below the market-clearing level without waiting. Others had limited access to staple goods and services, for which they either waited in line or paid a higher, sometimes illegal price. As long as the poor had money they could not spend, or faced higher prices to spend it, it is possible and even likely that consumption was distributed more unequally than income. This contrasts with the pattern that has been found to prevail in market economies, where consumption inequality is generally less than income inequality. But comprehensive data on Soviet consumption inequality would seem far more difficult to come by than income data, so this may well remain a conjecture.

Consumption inequality was important not only for ex post evaluation of economic welfare under Soviet arrangements. It was of central importance to the political economy of the time. During the 1930s, as Paul Gregory (2004: 76-109) has noted, Stalin received regular reports of discontent and falling effort among the workers in the provinces and intervened from time to time to improve their condition. When he did so, he did not order their wages to be raised because, in a supply-constrained economy, this would only have lengthened local queues. Rather, he ordered consumer goods in short supply to be redirected to the towns and factories where dissatisfaction was rising, so that the workers could more easily spend their wages.

The existence of unofficial incomes in the Soviet era only adds complexity to the problem. We guess that unofficial incomes were substantial but of time-varying size. Anecdotes on who received them are plentiful. The Soviet central bank compiled annual estimates of their aggregate size (Kashin and Mikov 2004), but we continue to lack (and may never find) data on their distribution. Thus, it is impossible to say whether their net effect was to increase or reduce the extent of inequality of different kinds.

To summarize, the extent to which Soviet institutions favoured the poorest in society is easily overstated. The impact of the Bolshevik Revolution was to flatten the distribution of wages. On that official measure income inequality fell sharply. But non-wage earnings were likely distributed more unequally than wages. Unofficial incomes also mattered; how they mattered is unclear. Consumption inequality mattered too, and arguably mattered more than income inequality. Most likely, consumption inequality did not fall to the same extent. Whereas consumption inequality in market economies is relatively stable, it is possible that Soviet consumption inequality was volatile, spiking in particular years of crisis.

Any judgement on new work must be preliminary, but my thoughts so far are as follows. NPZ (2017) is a substantial contribution. It is not the first word on the subject, and it will not be the last word either. It turns a new page and sets a new challenge.

Hope you liked hearing about my experiences, not sure if you can tell in the video but it’s quite a hard thing for me to talk about. It was quite a big step for me to go abroad by myself for the first time and this experience was really stressful for me.

I’d really like to stress that everyone else on the course had a great time at their homestay, it was a really valuable experience for the people I spoke to – some of them are even going back to visit their homestay family this year! Nowadays I’m not at all mad at the family, although the way they treated me seemed quite harsh, it could be due to cultural differences – I’m sorry for causing them any inconvenience/upset (they probably complain about the English girl they had to kick out too, it wasn’t the homestay either of us wanted and that is sad). The most upsetting part for me was my treatment from the man from the homestay company. I was really taken aback, every Japanese person I’d spoken to so far was so polite and this man was so horrible to me! It was really shocking to be called a ‘horrible young lady’ when all I’d done was had an allergic reaction! I thought he’d be more understanding, but what can you do!

Although it did knock my confidence a bit, it didn’t ruin my whole trip. I still had a really lovely time in Japan, it’s a really beautiful country and I really enjoy the learning the language.

Iron Man 3 is the summer’s biggest box office hit… and miss. Strap in for two hours of Pepper Potts kicking more ass than Tony Stark.