Steven Soderbergh, the supposedly retired director who somehow manages to keep working despite announcing his retirement, recently recut the Stanley Kubrick classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Soderbergh announced the film recut in a blog post. He said,
“Maybe this is what happens when you spend too much time with a movie: you start thinking about it when it’s not around, and then you start wanting to touch it. 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, and then over the holidays I decided to make my move.”
Most fans would find it a abhorrent to recut a Kubrick film let alone any film they love, but Soderbergh did it anyway. One of the major changes he did was cut 50 whole minutes from the movie.
The 1986 iconic science fiction film follows a series of encounters between humans and mysterious black monoliths that are apparently affecting human evolution, and a voyage to Jupiter tracing a signal emitted by one such monolith found on the Moon. The film is structured into four distinct acts. Daniel Richter plays the tool-wielding ape in the first act, and William Sylvester plays Dr. Heywood R. Floyd, the scientist investigating the Moon monolith, in the second. Keir Dullea (as Dr. David Bowman) and Gary Lockwood (as Dr. Frank Poole) star in the third act as the two astronauts on their voyage to Jupiter on board the spacecraft Discovery One, with Douglas Rain as the voice of the sentient computer HAL 9000 who has full control over their spacecraft. The fourth and final act of the film follows Bowman as he is transported by a Jupiter monolith and transformed into the Star Child.
You can check it out the Soderbergh recut here.
