Solaris

My two favorite examples of Hollywood utterly destroying GREAT foreign films are Vanilla Sky and City of Angels, which were abominations of two of my favorite films - Open Your Eyes and Wings of Desire. If you've seen Tarkovsky's brilliant "Solyaris" this film will seem more like an Americanized tribute than a Hollywoodization of a great piece of Soviet cinema. Some will likely ask why Soderbergh bothered to make this film if he couldn't improve on the original. Personally, I could not care less. This is a great film, and shows that it is possible for Americans to remake classic non-American films sensitively, intelligently and well.

To cut to the chase - if you like sci-fi with a soul,which stretches the boundaries of imagination, explores the uncharted realms of the human condition as much as the unknown realities of the universe, and swims upstream against the currents of ethics, physics, and even metaphysics, you will probably enjoy this moody, slow, multi-leveled and heavily textured film. If you're looking for light entertainment, stay away from this. This is a slow, intense film - dominated by dialog - and there is no action to speak of. Also, you need to let this movie pour into you slowly, so if you're not in the right frame of mind to pay attention and be receptive, you should save it for another occasion.

The cast is exceptionally good. This is unequivocally the best performance I have seen out of George Clooney, but the supporting cast and the female lead all blew me away. Soderbergh does have a talent for making actor's look good, even mediocre actors, but there is nothing mediocre about any of the performances in this film.

Though I recognize his talent, Soderberg's dialogical technique has worn particularly thin with me. The once fresh fast-paced, rapid-fire cuts and close-ups with the low-toned exchange of sentence fragments, and the myriad Soderberg imitators, particularly in television crime drama, have really gotten on my nerves. Solaris, however, is a bit different. There are only a few "Soderbergh moments" in this rich remake of the classic bit of 1970s soviet SciFi "Solyaris". Both films are based on a novella by the brilliant Stanislaw Lem. This film, perhaps even more than Tarkovsky's 1972 edgy, dark, and intense original, will appeal to exactly the sort of movie-goer that Lem's writing appeals to. Neither film captures Lem's quirky sense of humor. I am quite glad that Soderbergh chose to make Solaris with very much the same atmospheric eeriness, plot, and intellectual and emotional depth as the original. It is a tribute to his artistic integrity that he recognizes the brilliance of the original work, and imitates it wherever he can do no better, adding subtle and appropriate nuances and embellishments to make it his own. Some examples are the wonderfully minimalistic soundtrack, and the very Soderbergh symbolic use of lighting and color saturation to shift from the retrospective to the live-action shot. Perhaps the best tribute I can give this film is the fact that I am going to watch the original again in a few days for comparative purposes.

In other words, this isn't going to be for everybody, nor, even, for most. I am hardly surprised by the very low (in my opinion) ratings received by this film here on IMDb. Solaris is a love story, a story of exploring the fringes of sanity, and of questioning the very nature of reality, and much more. Enjoy it!

Story Something is wrong on the space station orbiting the mysterious planet Solaris, so Chris Kelvin (Clooney) goes there, all alone, to find out what's going on and to persuade the crew to come home. Turns out, when one is near Solaris, one tends to see dead people--or duplicates thereof. In Kelvin's case, this would be a doppelganger of his deceased wife, Rheya (McElhone), which seems to have Rheya's personality traits and memories.

I had heard that Solaris was excruciatingly slow and, consequently, unbearably boring, but I didn't quite agree. I understood that many shots were included or extended to set the mood, and to illustrate thought and memory, and it was all visually interesting. I could see, for example, where Soderbergh showed his love for Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey with lingering shots of Clooney in an astronaut's helmet, patterns of light reflected on its glass. However I would have traded the extra hour of atmospherics for a deeper exploration of the intriguing questions the premise raised. When we say we love someone, are we saying we love the sum of the person's characteristics? Were we to lose our loved one, would a twin with the same likes, dislikes, and quirks be a suitable replacement? Would you want to live on in the memories of your friends and family or, as Woody Allen prefers, to live on in your apartment? This film seems less interested in delving into these mysteries than it is in portraying grief and subjective memory. Valid objectives, but Solaris left me wanting to see an episode of the similarly themed Caprica (of which I've only seen the pilot movie).

Why you should see it You never got over that crush you developed on Clooney during his tenure on ER. You're in the mood for a visual poem of love and loss. You enjoy any movie set in outer space. You're the founder of Jeremy Davies/Dr. Faraday Fan Club.

Why you should avoid it Star Trek: The Next Generation was set in outer space too. Pick an episode and it will lead you through a debate of life's big questions, in half the time.

--from my review at www.1man365movies.com

Since I had just read Lem's novel Solaris and had in the past seen the 1972 Russian movie Solyaris, I was interested in seeing the new Solaris. Someone not familiar with the story may well be baffled by the movie. Those who have read the book will recognize the plot up to close to the end, where the movie veers off in its own attempt for a resolution that Lem did not seem to think necessary to provide in the novel.

I was disappointed that the movie had almost nothing to say or show about the sentient ocean of Solaris and humanity's failure to comprehend it. The book went into great detail in describing the fantastic phenomena of the ocean and the various failed theories to explain them. In fact I think that was the central theme of the book which is almost completely lost in the movie.

There are a number of good things about this movie, but ultimately it felt to me like a lost opportunity. It raised provocative psychological issues but never carried me away or led me to anything like an epiphany. In the latter half, I was in fact a bit bored. It certainly isn't enthralling like Tarkovsky's version. Rheya's character is better developed, particularly her own psychological trauma in being a "creation" (Tarkovsky's Rheya was something of a naif in comparison). But what I missed from Tarkovsky's version is the sense of humor (this one is stiflingly earnest) and the evocative and poignant use of Bach chorales in the soundtrack. The soundtrack to this one is intriguing (a la Brian Eno, Ligeti, and Thomas Newman's scores for The Player and American Beauty), but I eventually found myself desperately longing for a cadence. Lacking the feeling of redemption communicated musically in Tarkovsky's version, this one had to rely on ham-handed statements of fact. And finally, I can't help remarking that neither Tarkovsky nor Soderbergh really convey the element of shame and sexual deviance that played such an important part in Lem's original. Both place the emphasis instead on guilt, which isn't quite the same thing, is it?

Solaris (2002)

Some might find Solaris slow, or slick, or opaque, and I think it is all those things and for a good reason. Unlike Moon (2009), which is like a Tom Waits (and simplified) version of the same core theme, or 2001 (1968), which has something utterly impersonal to distinguish it, Solaris is a love story. And you are meant to float--or better, you are meant to be weightless--in the experience.

The music (evocative dreamy music, by Cliff Martinez) alone makes clear we are in suspension. It's a trip, in the druggy sense and in spiritual sense. We have to figure out what these other beings really are (they look human, and some of them are) and we have to decide what it means to be alive (is it simply self-awareness?). We have to even decide whether the characters should live in the lie of some invented reality that feels utterly real, or to go for the old fashioned real thing and leave love behind.

If it's love at all. After awhile you realize it's a kind a narcissism. And then you wonder why not? Whatever works, right?

The movie is gently confusing. The lead is George Clooney. The whole movie is George Clooney. His love interest (undefined for here) is played by the big-eyed Natascha McElhone. If her staring eyes and gentle loving neediness seem a little overdone, it's for good reason. As you'll see (blame George). And the planet itself, exerting some kind of power over the consciousness of the humans on this floating (large) spaceship, represents something approaching God in its power and mystery. It's an atheist's movie, I'm sure, but filled with spiritual and human optimism.

Most viewers don't know that this is a remake, and hard core film buffs dismiss this American Steven Soderbergh version as Hollywood at its worst (big budget, sentimental, pretty beyond reason). The earlier Soviet version (from 1972) is really interesting, too, and parts of it are even slower. On purpose. Other parts seem dated, to me, and if I think of the effects and the idea as ahead of its time, I remind myself that this earlier one is after, not before, Kubrick's Space Odyssey and so the whole progression is skewed. The Soviet version also seems more sexist, more male dominant, and whatever demeaning qualities exist in this more recent one, they seem more in balance, man to woman, at least in a less male gaze way.

But academic analysis creeps in on a movie that is really much more about experiencing its mood, its tragedy and hope, and its delicate floating beauty, which I seem to enjoy without thinking too hard. There are moments, including the Michelangelo creation scene with the boy (yes!), that push it far too far (and seem Kubrick inspired, without Kubrick's icy sensibility). You might also be able to edit it differently to make it more compact. But these are debates to have once you've seen the movie. A warning: it's depressing to some people. To me, though, it's soothing. And the open ended qualities might make you want to see it again.