Watch Steven Soderbergh’s Re-Edited Version of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey Free Online

In 2013, Steven Soder­bergh told me dur­ing an inter­view that he was retir­ing. “Five years ago, as we were fin­ish­ing Che, I said, ‘OK, when I turn 50, I want to be done. I’m going to jam in as much as I can, but when I turn 50, I want to be done.’ ”

Yet Soderbergh’s con­cept of retire­ment must be dif­fer­ent from most mor­tals. In the past year, he not only exec­u­tive pro­duced the Show­time series The Knick but he also direct­ed all ten episodes. Using the han­dle @Bitchuation, he wrote an entire nov­el on Twit­ter called Glue. And he pro­duced and direct­ed a Broad­way show star­ring Chloë Grace Moretz called The Library. And in his copi­ous free time, he’s been pro­duc­ing var­i­ous cin­e­mat­ic exper­i­ments on his web­site Exten­sion 765, which includ­ed a piece that spliced togeth­er Alfred Hitchcock’s Psy­cho with Gus Van Sant’s bizarro shot-by-shot remake, a black and white ver­sion of Raiders of the Lost Ark and an edit of Michael Cimino’s famous­ly bloat­ed Heaven’s Gates.

In his lat­est work, Soder­bergh takes a crack at Stan­ley Kubrick’s mas­ter­piece 2001: A Space Odyssey. You can watch it here. As he writes on his site:

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. why now? I don’t know. maybe i wasn’t old enough to touch it until now. maybe i was too scared to touch it until now, because not only does the film not need my—or any­one else’s—help, but 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. mean­ing IF i was final­ly going to touch it, i’d bet­ter have a big­ger idea than just trim­ming or re-scor­ing.

What that big­ger idea is, how­ev­er, isn’t imme­di­ate­ly clear. Soderbergh’s ver­sion is a good 50 min­utes short­er than the orig­i­nal. Unlike the orig­i­nal, which unfolds in a delib­er­ate pace, Soderbergh’s ver­sion moves briskly. Most of the cuts aren’t imme­di­ate­ly missed.

But there is one clear, and jar­ring dif­fer­ence between the two – he drops HAL’s unblink­ing elec­tron­ic red eye into unex­pect­ed scenes. It pops up right in the begin­ning, then again when the tribe of ear­ly humans first encounter the mono­lith, and then again dur­ing the film’s trip­py light show deep at the end. Where­as Kubrick used the HAL’s eye as a sin­is­ter exam­ple of the per­ils of tech­nol­o­gy and mankind’s hubris, Soder­bergh turns it into some­thing else, some­thing more spir­i­tu­al. Does it work? I don’t know. But it’s inter­est­ing.

Soder­bergh goes on to argue that Kubrick, were he alive, would be a big fan of dig­i­tal video and he makes a pret­ty com­pelling case.

i believe SK would have embraced the cur­rent crop of dig­i­tal cam­eras, because from a visu­al stand­point, he was obsessed with two things: absolute fideli­ty to real­i­ty-based light sources, and image sta­bi­liza­tion. regard­ing the for­mer, the increased sen­si­tiv­i­ty with­out res­o­lu­tion loss allows us to real­ly cap­ture the world as it is, and regard­ing the lat­ter, post-2001 SK gen­er­al­ly shot mat­te perf film (nor­mal­ly reserved for effects shots, because of its added steadi­ness) all day, every day, some­thing which dig­i­tal cap­ture makes moot. pile on things like nev­er being dis­tract­ed by weav­ing, splices, dirt, scratch­es, bad lab match­es dur­ing changeovers, changeovers them­selves, bad fram­ing and focus exac­er­bat­ed by pro­jec­tor vibra­tion, and you can see why i think he might dig dig­i­tal.

Again, you can watch Soder­bergh’s re-edit of 2001 here. More films can be found in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Steven Soderbergh’s Cre­ative Mashup of Hitch­cock and Gus Van Sant’s Psy­cho Films

Steven Soder­bergh Cre­ates Silent, Black & White Recut of Raiders of the Lost Ark to Explain the Art of “Stag­ing”

Steven Soder­bergh Cre­ates a Big List of What He Watched, Read & Lis­tened to in 2014

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.