"i’ve been watching 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY regularly for four decades, but it wasn’t until a few years ago i started thinking about touching it," Steven Soderbergh writes (in all lowercase) on Extension 765. And he’s not kidding. As detailed in his lengthy list of everything he watched and read last year, Soderbergh sat down with Stanley Kubrick‘s "2001: A Space Odyssey" three times in 2014, and then read "The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey" by Piers Bizony. And now, he felt ready to take the scissors to the movie.
As he did for "Psycho" and "Raiders Of The Lost Ark," Soderbergh has taken Kubrick’s film and put through his own filter, resulting in a shorter version (running a mere one-hour-and-fifty minutes long), that is also radically recut. And for you tech heads, Soderbergh has a lot to say about his many viewing experiences of ‘2001’ (he used the Blu-ray transfer for this):
i’ve seen every conceivable kind of film print of 2001, from 16mm flat to 35mm internegative to a cherry camera negative 70mm in the screening room at warner bros, and i’m telling you, none of them look as good as a bluray played on an pioneer elite plasma kuro monitor….
MY ONE GIGANTIC ISSUE WITH THIS TRANSFER is that you can see, in the dawn of man sequence, the cross-hatched patterns of the front projection screen in several shots. this is INEXCUSBALE. i never saw these patterns in any film prints—this would never have gotten past the polaroid-happy SK—and ANY transfer in which these patterns are visible no matter how your monitor/TV is set up is TECHNICALLY FUCKED AND COMPLETELY WRONG.
If you’re wondering why Soderbergh is so excitable when it comes to transfer issues for ‘2001,’ it’s because he believes "if it’s not THE most impressively imagined and sustained piece of visual art created in the 20th century, then it’s tied for first. And few would debate him there."
So grab some popcorn and head over to Extension 765 and see what Soderbergh has put together.
I can see the cinema Taliban are out in force.
@Drew – cutting Kubrick is like FILMING Shakespeare – and we have done plenty of that. The idea that Soderbergh\’s edit of "2001" is somehow more outrageous than, say, the number Baz Lurhman did on Shakespeare with his coked up "Romeo & Juliet" is silly. There are no sacred texts in cinema. Film is clay. It\’s silly putty. It\’s meant to be molded, shaped, stretched, enjoyed. If it ever hardens into a dusty marble statue, it\’s dead.
Artists have been re-imagining, editing, and re-shaping classic pieces of entertainment for centuries. That is part of the process of a society extending the relevancy of a work, even as the society itself morphs into something unrecognizable to the period when the work was first created.
It speaks volumes about the impact of Kubrick\’s vision of the future that artists find something fresh to explore nearly 50 years after it first screened.
@Drew, Actually respectable theatre companies cut Shakespeare all the time.
That said … I\’m not at all impressed by this re-imagining of 2001.
Removing virtually the entire narrative exposition leading up to the reveal of the monolith on at Clavius, leaving only establishing shots just guts the film. We see Floyd arrive at the space station and then leave. We see him arrive at a meeting, but aren\’t allowed to attend, we see him choosing a sandwich. WTF? Sorry, but the minimal dialog of the original doesn\’t need to be cut even more. Also the cuts seem arbitrary. Who cares about the voice print identification scene when we don\’t get to find out what the briefing was about? Who cares about ham sandwiches when we don\’t see the preliminary pictures of the excavation site?
If you want to make the film move faster, at least cut out the superfluous moments and leave the story, not the other way around.
Also, the distracting sound delay – Frank Poole and David Bowman watch the BBC news transmission – and then later, anything coming from the ships speakers is, one can only imagine, supposed to simulate the acoustic characteristics of the ship. Sounds more like a sports arena sound system. Really laughably bad idea. Kubrick would probably want to punch you for this. Ruins the entire effort as far as I\’m concerned.
Really Steven? Really?
To the previous commenters: stop acting like you own the film. What Soderbergh is doing is not an attempt to make a better version than Kubrick did. What he is trying to do is gain a new or deeper understanding and reinterpret the original. Do you think a film can only be understood one way, or that there is one interpretation of the story? A recut like this is similar to someone looking back on the memory of the film and considering the implications of the sequence of shots in a new way. Of course, Kubrick cuts away to the monolith when the ape discovers the bone as a tool; Soderbergh cuts to the eye of HAL. Why? He\’s trying to bring to light a certain subtext regarding the effect whatever extra-terrestrial presence the monolith came from has on HAL, the Jupiter Mission, and Dave Bowman. That subtext could have always been there, depending on who you ask. I\’m sorry that some people are so inflexible in their appreciation for some things. Trust that I am a purist, and the original cut of 2001 is one of my favorite films… but I still have the capacity to take in a new perspective on this film because I never decide that my understanding or opinion of something is static because that\’s not how things are.
Jesus!.. Cutting Kubrick is like cutting Shakespeare… You just don\’t do it..
What a tatal narcissistic D-bag this guy is, wow!..
Fixing technical flaws in a transfer is one thing. Recutting "2001", the finest science fiction movie ever made, even as some kind of private or semi-private experiment or mash-up or whatever other cute term has become trendy, is another. In fact, it\’s a borderline disgrace. "2001" doesn\’t need a recut by anybody. Hands off!
tough I don\’t think this movie need any cuts, i would gladly watch it with him. i love this guy!