MUBI

This was one of my most anticipated films of my Criterion Collection. It had been built up a lot, and it succeeded in most regards to living up to its high praises. It’s one of those films you walk into expecting a masterpiece. And while it was missing that extra something to make me call it a masterpiece, it’s easy to see the merits the film possesses and the reasons why it gets all of its praise. I agree that it’s important and easily a classic and landmark scifi film.

This being the first Tarkovsky film I’ve seen, I was absolutely blown away by the haunting cinematography. It added to the haunting plot. The camerawork winds its way around the space shuttle in a ghost like fashion, bringing the audience into the swirling psyche of the characters, which mirrors the whirlpool planet beneath them. It builds an atmosphere which is hard to shake after the film has finished. Like the entire film, it lasts like double mint gum. Making the viewer chew over the atmosphere, characters, and deeply philosophical plot.

It’s hard to describe the film after one viewing. The basic plot is about a man who goes to a shuttle on a foreign planet to psychoanalyze the crew members who have been sending back strange reports. While on the shuttle, he falls victim to the psychological effects which have been haunting the crew members. He sees a wife who he has lost in the past, and no matter what he does he can’t shake his former love from haunting him. The themes run throughout the film and only tighten as the plot advances. It shows the way people can tend to live in the past, and how we can allow the past to define us wether it be past mistakes, or past events that have shaped you.

This film has intrigued me into exploring other Tarkovsky works. The performances and every other aspect of the film gives a haunting impression. It’s part scifi horror, part psychological thriller, and even has hints of Bunuel in there. Highly recommended.

“What a great movie, and what a twist ending! That last scene was like something out of the best episodes of The Twilight Zone!” leads to “…Come to think of it, that whole movie seemed sort of like a Twilight Zone premise” inevitably leads to “The Twilight Zone managed to do stories like this ALL THE TIME without being three fucking hours long. I don’t care how great of a master of visual storytelling you are, take that shit to the editing room and come back with a movie that has a middle section that I don’t need a pot of coffee to stay awake during.”

All that said, I’ve been flipping from “brilliant” to “shitty” all night long, hence the 2.5. By tomorrow my opinion could be the complete opposite. Here are the things that I think are going to stay constant:

1. Henri Burton is the most interesting character in the whole movie and he’s not even in it past the first 45 minutes.

2. The cinematography was Goddamn amazing.

3. The middle hour is far and away the least compelling part of the movie.

The damn thing is legitimately just a long-ass Twilight Zone episode that has great acting and is really well shot but also has scenes where you might have to look at a plant or a freeway or the front of somebody’s bed for a couple of minutes at a time, which I guess Tarkovsky thought was more interesting than the whole “The Ocean of Solaris is a living organism and also oh shit my wife is here and that means we’ve got some pretty stock tragic couple issues that we need to sort out” thing. Sometimes he’s right about that! But most of the time he isn’t.

Impossible to describe properly, Solaris does for the human being internally what 2001 A Space Odyssey does for the human being externally. The themes and messages conveyed in Solaris are almost impossible to be pinpointed, but that’s not a bad thing. I honestly saw a lot in common with this film and the aforementioned 2001 in the way they both, in different ways, examine what it is to be human, and what human beings all endure in their lives.

I truly enjoyed this movie. While I found Stalker just a tad too slow for my taste, Solaris’s pauses and downtimes actually gave me moments to think and absorb its themes to fully digest them while viewing.

While the film was not without its flaws (it was a bit slow, still) I thought it was really an incredible artistic work. This being my second Tarkovsky film, I’m finding myself quite enamored with his work.

Can’t wait to watch the Soderberg version for an intensely different movie. :)

I’ve enjoyed both Tarkovsky and Soderbergh versions equally, but they are two completely different films that appeal to two different sides of the brain. I find they complement each other well, and if it were up to me, I’d package both films together. Pacing is sort of an issue with Tarkovsky’s films — I found “Stalker” unbearably slow, whereas in “Solaris”, it serves to augment the story’s sense of dread, disorientation, isolation — and it probably won’t suit most modern audiences. However, from an intellectual, philosophical point of view, this film lingers in the mind long after you’ve seen it.

“I don’t like science fiction, or rather the genre SF is based on. All those games with technology, various futurological tricks and inventions which are always somehow artificial. But I’m interested in problems I can extract from fantasy. Man and his problems, his world, his anxieties. Ordinary life is also full of the fantastic. Life itself is a fantastic phenomenon. Fyodor Dostoievsky knew it well. That’s why I want to focus on life itself — everyday, ordinary. Because within it anything can happen. My Solaris is not after all true science fiction. Neither is its literary predecessor. What counts here is man, his personality, his very persistent bonds with planet Earth, responsibility for the times he lives in. I don’t like your typical science fiction, I don’t understand it, I don’t belive in it. The fact is when I was working on Solaris I was concerned with the same subject as in Rublov. Human being. These two films are only separated by the time the action is taking place.” -A.K.

Donatas Banionis in one of his TV-interviews admitted that Tarkovsky never shared the idea of the film with actors. He just needed their faces to look into camera or up or down…

Why Soderbergh didnt make his own Solaris by writing his own script based on Stanislaw Lem’s novel? Why did he take Tarkovsky’s script which contradicts with Lem’s idea of Solaris? I do not see any value in Soderbergh’s film. Just another commercial project. It is like painting over Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa with hi-tech colours.