Solaris - Criterion Collection

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The Russian answer to 2001, and very nearly as memorable a movie. The legendary Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky made this extremely deliberate science-fiction epic, an adaptation of a novel by Stanislaw Lem. The story follows a cosmonaut (Donatas Banionis) on an eerie trip to a planet where haunting memories can take physical form. Its bare outline makes it sound like a routine space-flight picture, an elongated Twilight Zone episode; but the further into its mysteries we travel, the less familiar anything seems. Even though Tarkovsky's meanings and methods are sometimes mystifying, Solaris has a way of crawling inside your head, especially given the slow pace and general lack of forward momentum. By the time the final images cross the screen, Tarkovsky has gone way beyond SF conventions into a moving, unsettling vision of memory and home. Well worthy of cult status, Solaris is both challenging art-house fare and a whacked-out head trip. --Robert Horton

Customer Reviews:

This one is a selective viewing.......2007-07-30

I originally saw this movie when it was on cable a year ago. When I saw it I was in an inebriated state. It is a long and drawn out movie with DEEP metaphysical meanings and short on actual entertainment. I ordered it because I created a weekend activity called "Bender Weekend" the point of which is to play drinking games to Sci Fi movies, and as the weekend progresses the movies are more and more metaphysical in nature. The end of bender weekend caps out with "Altered States", "2001", and this one.

If you want entertainment, stay away from this movie. If you like metaphysical tones and are willing to see past the low budget, long drawn out scenes, there is value in this movie. So you will either love, or completely despise this movie.

The Science of the Human Emotion.......2007-07-26

Solaris is perhaps one of the most nerving science-fiction films I have ever seen. Beginning strongly with the skepticism of a tired, yet professional psychologist, Solaris follows this man into the outer reaches of our own world and knowledge, and to a place that is, 'simply,' unfathomable. Our lead character, after a strange briefing, arrives on the Solaris space station, orbiting the planet Solaris, to figure out what has gone wrong with the crew, and why they have cut off all communication with Earth. As answers develop, and further questions arrise, one immediately begins to feel the horror of human frailty. Solaris hits hard, develops characters unlike many films do anymore, and ends with closure, questions, and a satisfactory level of goosebumps.

Solaris is artfully filmed, with a lot of time spent on landscapes and close-ups. This is a long film, but is over quickly. The discovery of the 'mysteries' occuring on the Solaris space station are very disturbing, and leave the viewer with plenty to think about (or perhaps dream about), days later. The Criterion Collection was done well with plenty of special features, but really deserves a much better enhanced picture. There are many signs of aging in this film, and a remastering, or even a high definition version, could easily be an achievement for a film well-deserving. Additionally, the audio is Russian-mono with subtitles. I highly recommend this for purchase, however, despite aged film. The story alone is memorable for a lifetime.

The most boring film of all time?.......2007-07-04

Okay, let me just start off by saying I actually like Soderberg's Solaris quite a bit. I had faint memories of trying to watch the original on Laserdisc years back and the only thing I remembered was a friend of mine making fun of a series of goofy shots taken in freeway tunnels.

It turns out that was my favorite part of the film. Solaris is the absolute epitome of obnoxious, purposefully obtuse cinema -- where the point of a scene or character simply takes five times longer than it should. Look no further than the introductory exposition wit the pilot -- My GOD it takes forever! And the main character -- for a psychiatrist shows almost no interest in much of anything other than his wonky blue leather jacket. I mean, it's terrible folks.

But when things get really unbearable is when you finally get to the space station. The "suspense" is laughably bad. I won't go into details but nothing is impressive -- it's not creepy, very thought-provoking, and the set looks like the old Space Mountain ride at Disneyland. A totally clumsy fumbling that evinces nothing much more than inept storytelling. Tarkovsky is a wanker.

So why two stars? Because the cinematography is realtively good and there is some fascination in watching a Soviet "big budget" Sci-Fi film. So on a purely film school level it has a modicum of appeal. I'm serious though -- the Steven Soderbergh version is just as thought provoking and quite well made.

Islands of Memory.......2007-06-14

Unlike Soderbergh's interminable and seemingly much longer take on Stanislaw Lem's novel, Tarkovsky's Solaris is a sensual film, but one where the senses aren't exactly numbed as dulled into a kind of half-dreamlike state. Like the reeds in the opening shot, you have to go with the ebb and flow - it's almost more of a feeling than a film. And, it has to be said, at times that feeling can be like being lulled to the verge of sleep, while at others it's like being caught up in a fever. It's tempting to wonder what Werner Herzog makes of the film.

Lem famously disliked the film with a passion, feeling it gave into the heart rather the head with trite clichés: "Instead of focusing on deeper moral questions related to frontiers of human knowledge, he made a drama-type Crime and Punishment in space, by making up unnecessary characters of parents and relatives, then adding a hut on an island," was one of his less bitter comments after he fell out with Tarkovsky writing the script, although that implies a far more sentimental film than Tarkovsky delivered. Certainly the issue of whether the visitors are a gift, an experiment, a probe or a defensive psychological attack on the scientists is all but ignored in favor of their emotional effects on Kelvin and (to a much lesser effect) the scientists: these characters really aren't looking for answers, they're looking for a mirror, and it's their insular nature that condemns them to literally float in their own islands of memory (or a `hut on an island' if you ascribe to Lem's view).

Rather than a formulaic movie redemption tale or Lem's examination of our inability to truly comprehend a superior alien intelligence because of the biological limitations imposed on us almost as design faults, Tarkovsky's film is about the limitations we impose on ourselves regardless of how far we technically advance and our inability to rise above them. Its nominal hero, Kelvin, is not a pleasant man and the film makes little attempt to bring the audience to his side. He treats the disgraced Cosmonaut Burton with insensitivity, professes a ruthless scientific pragmatism that allows for no human element and his immediate response to his first `guest' on the Solaris research station is to deceive and dispose of her. Yet ultimately, as much because of his emotional limitations as in spite of them, he's the one human being who acts most humanely by recognising, albeit in a totally self-centred way, that the fault lies not in the stars but in themselves. Like Burton's young son with the horse in the lengthy prologue on Earth, he displays a childlike fear and rejection of something he doesn't understand before reluctantly accepting that it may have beauty, even if it's a beauty he cannot comfortably embrace.

But the most human character remains the least human: Hari, or rather his image of his dead wife Hari, unable to feel anything that he does not remember for her, stifled by his limitations and gradually assuming a painful awareness and despair of her own. Ironically, it's as she becomes more human that she becomes more unstable. To the other scientists it's because the visitors are unstable neutrino systems, but it's when the artificial Hari studies a painting - another artificial creation of man's consciousness - which triggers a real memory that the horror of her situation as a mere facsimile strikes home. To Kelvin she's at first more a penance than a second chance, a condemnation to repeat history while remaining oblivious - as he presumably did with the real Hari - to the person she is really becoming.

So, not exactly a barrel of laughs, but strangely compelling if you go with it. The 165 minutes don't exactly fly by, but they certainly can get under your skin if you're in a receptive mood and it's not hard to see why it's been so influential on Hollywood sci-fi (Sphere, Event Horizon and Star Trek The Motion Picture among the most prominent).

So, why only three stars? Well, sadly, I was shocked by just how bad the picture quality of the first hour of the Criterion DVD was compared to the PAL Russico/Artificial Eye one - aside from some grading and subtitle changes it looks like you're watching a bad standards conversion of a video tape that's been burned onto a CD-R for all of the Earth-bound sequences, although the color is better. If it weren't for the better extras package - including several deleted/extended scenes and detailed interviews - I doubt I'd have kept this copy.

A Retrospective About Love - Tarkovsky.......2007-03-21

I'm wary of calling any of my blattering theoretic, not even if I ever tried to present it coherently. My thoughts have most certainly been said in a better fashion by those by whom I've been influenced, and by others who know about things a lot more than me. I follow Harold Bloom, Sören Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Kabbalistic concepts although they aren't about cinema, per se. But they did write about things that make a life - and cinema is one way of living a life. In cinematic thinking perhaps the most influential concepts have been self-reference in general: the ideas of illustrated text by Peter Greenaway, sculpting in time by Tarkovsky and also the writings about folding by Ted Goranson, who has been writing on IMDb for years.

The only real goal of my film life is to see cinema lucidly, not through theoretical intellect but through my heart and soul. I'm not interested in giving you the polarized opposites of mind/heart etc., because what's at least as fun as watching the film is thinking about it afterwards. Then again, I'm in love with literature, so writing is a vehicle (often an excuse) to visit here time and again, updating comments that I confess aren't aimed at being that useful for anyone other than myself; it's flattering if anyone finds them and doesn't blame them for their author's mistakes. A short definition of this lucid experiencing is to be influenced in the soul in a positive way; and to experience that constantly is what should build us at least a tiny bit happier. Tarkovsky is a lucid master, and each of his films is an experience to be not only experienced, but really lived through again and again. They're all remarkable (nay, say brilliant) films that transcend conventional barriers, but I personally prefer "Rublev", "Zerkalo" and "Nostalghia" and find things from them that come easier than that from others.

But this particular film is one of the few that are cinematically sensual, heartbreakingly bittersweet. It's a moment of happiness that knows it will go away eventually never returning, a conscious step from one direction to another, knowing that each decision, each selection of images, will change our life and that it will never be the sam again. "Solaris" is part of the small selection of "romantic" films I adore for their quietude and bittersweetness and how this particularly complicated emotion translates to cinema. For isn't bittersweetness rather directly tied to the translusence of memories, and to the acknowledgment of times past? A conscious sorrow that defines and defeats itself, a force unnatural and unpredictable. The reason why we can emote to his art is that although he is abstract, he's real - he doesn't invent an emotion that is artificially connected to the images that he creates, it's as if he channels it, that he would become one with a stream of life, freely hovering through space we can't see.

Yes, it's an illusion, but in his hands it's never a lie.

With best regards,
AK

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