Re-Cut Trailer For 2001: A Space Odyssey Imagines How It Would Be Sold Today
In 1968, director Stanley Kubrick embarked on a mission to re-shape and re-define what we knew as cinema. His sci-fi film about the future of space missions and technology elevated movies to an artform. But what if 2001: A Space Odyssey came out today? What if it was sold as a potential summer blockbuster like Prometheus or the new Transformers movie? This recut 2001: A Space Odyssey trailer brings that vision to Stanley Kubrick’s genre-defining masterpiece.
The trailer is a display of quick cutting, vague storytelling and has a modern music sensibility. The music behind this re-cut trailer was by Jack Trammell and was called “Tactical Dominance,” which is exactly the feeling you get while watching it. It’s put together very well and creatively. If 2001: A Space Odyssey came out today, this would be the way Warner Bros would sell it to audiences. It almost feels like the trailer for Christopher Nolan’s Inception with its grand images and big ideas.
It’s difficult to tell how contemporary audiences might receive a movie like 2001: A Space Odyssey if it came out today. It’s a movie more about its ideas than presenting a cohesive narrative. It’s intentionally flawed.
Nevertheless, the re-cut trailer presents 2001: A Space Odyssey as an action film with a clear-cut villain in HAL-9000 rather than an ambiguous one. Was HAL-9000 or were the humans who made him the evildoers? If you compare the re-cut trailer to the original, then it’s pretty clear they present two very different movies.
