Solaris (2002)
Directed by
Stephen Soderbergh
Overview
Solaris is the story of a mind-reading planet (or star) that reconstructs images from a person’s past to create human-like visitors for the inhabitants of a space station situated millions of miles from earth. The film is not a three act exposition in the traditional sense of a movie but rather a meditation on death, acceptance, and reality. Partly to this end, the director has stated that anyone who does not enjoy the first 10 minutes of the movie will probably not like the remaining hour and a half. While clearly a science-fiction film,
Solaris concentrates mostly on the
fiction aspect of the genre, with technology and outer space serving a more metaphorical purpose as a setting of isolation rather than as a story device for action and plot sequences. This unconventional use of science fiction, typical of the original story’s author, Stanislaw Lem, along with his criticisms of other genre writers was, in fact, enough to get Lem booted from the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1976.
The story is set into motion when communications are lost with the space station and a garbled distress signal from the station’s inhabitants is received on earth. The remainder of the story takes place inside the space station orbiting Solaris, the movie’s namesake as well as the name of the mind-reading planet, and essentially involves only four characters. The film’s main character, Chris Kelvin (George Clooney), agrees to travel to Solaris to investigate the matter and attempt to salvage the station’s mission. There he meets the station’s only other human inhabitants, Gordon (Viola Davis) and Snow (Jeremey Davies), and learns of Solaris’ ability to recreate images from a person’s past. Kelvin is drawn into this world of re-creation and, maybe like Deckard in
Blade Runner, must ultimately decide whether memories and emotions are enough to make someone a human being. While Kelvin is contemplating these things a parallel story develops in a series of flashbacks to Kelvin’s time on earth. In a clever narrative device, these stories move in tandem with each other.
I chose to post this movie because most people either love it or hate it. From what has been posted in the forum here, most people seem to hate it. In fairness, the marketers of this movie faced a difficult task in selling
Solaris to the public. It is not really a love story and it is not a Hollywood science fiction film. If people can go into this movie with the expectation that they will be watching a meditation on reality and death rather than a movie about aliens and spaceships, I think they will be a lot more accepting of what they see. It takes some patience to enjoy this movie, and maybe it is too much to expect from a medium that is used largely for entertainment. And yes, the Clooney ass shots are gratuitous, but I don’t think that should take away from the work as a whole.
Source Material and Influences
Stephen Soderbergh’s adaptation of the movie is based loosely on the 1972 Andrei Tarkovsky film of the same name and Stanislaw Lem’s original novel. The Lem novel stands as one of the greatest science-fiction works of all time. Originally written in Polish, the English translation was apparently done with a pocket dictionary or AltaVista Babelfish, because it reads like a set of toaster instructions. Nevertheless, anyone who is a fan of science fiction or philosophy should put this novel on their required reading list. In spite of its stylistic handicap, the book is extremely well put together and unique in what it decides to explore. What the movie adaptations were able to spend five minutes examining, Lem is able to dedicate 20 pages.
Tarkovskly adapted the novel in 1972 largely as a Russian reaction to Kubrick’s,
2001: A Space Odyssey. The movie was of unprecedented scale for a Russian production and remains a cult classic even today. Although certainly dated and slow-paced by today's standards, the 1972 film remains an important part of sci-fi film history and is recommended viewing for anyone who has enjoyed the novel or is a fan of classic cinema. Never to be one short of criticism, Lem had major issues with the Tarkovsky film. While the film was immensely more faithful in its adaptation than the Soderbergh movie, the religious symbolism in the Tarkovsky version reportedly left Lem very angry after seeing the finished work. (Whereas Arthur C. Clarke worked closely with Kubrick on
2001, Lem had no involvement in Tarkovsky’s production.)
The Soderbergh adaptation is clearly influenced by the Tarkovsky original and
2001. If
2001 is a story of traveling outward and away to find meaning, Solaris is the story of traveling outward as means to looking inward. Visually, the austere and sterile settings of Kubrick are closely paralleled by Soderbergh. The spaceship docking sequence in Solaris is clearly inspired by the same scene in
2001. Soderbergh also pays homage to the 1972
Solaris. He mimics much of Tarkovsky’s camera work from the original. Dialogue shots tend to linger on a character even after he or she has finished speaking, without the quick cutaways that are more frequent in more mainstream cinema. Soderbergh also borrows the long camera pan as technique to convey the surreal.
All in all, I think it is a great movie, and I'm sorry to see it get such a bad rap.
IMDB entry
Stanislaw Lem web page (run by Lem's son)
I can't use netflix cos I'm in the uk, and the version that I use (
