Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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78 of 85 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Flick Not for Many Tastes, but DVD is Film Student's Delight, November 14, 2004
This review refers to the DVD release of Solaris, the remake. Just a couple of notes from the outset:
(1) This film will not be well-liked by most people. There are a ton of spoilers in most reviews, so I'll try to boil it down for its essence to avoid ruining the unfolding of the movie should you choose to see it: a guy goes to a spaceship where weird things are happening and sees his dead wife. Maybe. That's all you need to know about the plot. The movie, some might think is slow, there's no action, it's a head-tripper, and honestly, had I not read the book before and also seen the magnificent Tarkovsky original, I might not have followed what was going on. As such, while I really enjoyed it, I can't call it either a great film nor one that is likely to appeal to a broad cross-section of movie watchers. There are some heady issues surrounding reality, consciousness, life and death, and if you take them too seriously you'll find yourself snoozing.
It's definitely in Soderbergh's style, and it's been fun watching him skip between genres in recent years, but it's more like "The Limey" and less like "Erin Brockovich" if you want to pin it down. While it's not an indy flick -- in the sense it's expensive and bankrolled and produced in Hollywood fashion -- it feels like a small art film or an indy. And please, god, don't expect "Aliens" or "Titanic" because James Cameron's name is over the credits as Producer.
(2) Both the original book and the Tarkovsky film have much to recommend them, although they also share characteristics of being verbally philosophical and talky which this version most assuredly does not. This version is incredibly tight.
(3) If you're a film student or into the mechanics of film, though, this DVD edition is an utter delight. I can easily see this sequence in a film class curriculum: watch the movie; watch the DVD commentary; read the screenplay; watch the Tarkovsky "original"; read the Lem original source book; write your term paper.
The DVD contains two interesting but not unusual featurettes on the making of the film. It also includes, somewhat unusually, a complete original screenplay (that you have to page through with the fast forward button). And it contains the customary Director's commentary, featuring director Stephen Soderbergh and producer James Cameron bantering about the movie. (In the honest assessment of Sodbergh, the commentary is "Just another version of two white guys sitting around talking.")
The two of them discuss nearly every choice that was made in assembling the movie, from lighting and the use of post-production to CGI and whether to rehearse actors or not and dozens of technical tricks. And the movie itself is sort of like a catalog of techniques and effects. I don't mean to imply it's showing off: it simply uses a huge variety of film techniques to move the story along, and Cameron and Soderbergh discuss in the commentary both what works and what didn't work, what reshoots were required, what processes underlay the film, how the rewrites were done, and so forth -- and do it in a rather entertaining way, to this film fan, at least.
And one of the things I enjoyed both about the film and the DVD is the way Soderbergh just endlessly pillages other directors and films: Hitchcock, Kubrick, Tarkovsky himself, Eisenstein, heck, even the Lumiere brothers -- even a dash of James Cameron. As Cameron himself says at the end of the commentary, "There are no new ideas. We're a hundred years into the process of filmmaking now."
As such, while I enjoyed watching the movie, I rather much more enjoyed immediately re-viewing it with the commentary, and I think this is going to be a keeper for those who like studying technical details. It's like "Citizen Kane" in that it comes close to summarizing what the 21st century film-maker has at his or her fingertips (the way "Kane" slopped together virtually every technique of 1941 -- rest assured I'm not actually comparing the film's stature to Kane.) There's a bit of what Soderberg immodestly calls "pure cinema", visual-only story-telling, which does remind me of "The Limey" and some of the silent classics as well as "2001" and the original "Solaris", and I mean that all in a complimentary sense.
It's also a huge genre-bender. There are elements of slasher flicks, ghost stories, horror, detective mystery, romantic tragedies, a very slight dash of comedy (thanks largely to the great Jeremey Davies in a supporting role), Soviet agitprop, Godard nouvelle vague, 1930s theatre, and who knows what else I missed the first couple of times I saw it.
This is not a flick you're going to want to pick out for Saturday night brain candy, or to change your mood if you're depressed, because it will either bore you or depress you more if you want mood-altering fluff. But it's a good one-timer for those who like the brain-bending what-is-reality film along the lines of Philip K. Dick or Alejandro Almenabar, and a multi-viewer for film school.
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29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Solaris" Intellectual Sci-Fi, March 11, 2004
By A Customer
Solaris" tells the story of a planet that reads minds, and obliges its visitors by devising and providing people they have lost, and miss. The Catch-22 is that the planet knows no more than its visitors know about these absent people. As the film opens, two astronauts have died in a space station circling the planet, and the survivors have sent back alarming messages. A psychiatrist named Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) is sent to the station, and when he awakens after his first night on board, his wife, Rheya (Natascha McElhone), is in bed with him. Some time earlier on earth, she had committed suicide."She's not human," Kelvin is warned by Dr. Helen Gordon (Viola Davis), one of the surviving crew members. Kelvin knows this materialization cannot be his wife, yet is confronted with a person who seems palpably real, shares memories with him and is flesh and blood. The other survivor, the goofy Snow (Jeremy Davies), asks, "I wonder if they can get pregnant?" This story originated with a Polish novel by Stanislaw Lem that is considered one of the major adornments of science fiction. It was made into a 1972 movie of the same name by the Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky. Now Steven Soderbergh has retold it in the kind of smart film that has people arguing about it on their way out of the theater. The movie needs science fiction to supply the planet and the space station, which furnish the premise and concentrate the action, but it is essentially a psychological drama. When Kelvin arrives on the space station, he finds the survivors seriously spooked. Soderbergh directs Jeremy Davies to escalate his usual style of tics and stutters, to the point where a word can hardly be uttered without his hands waving to evoke it from the air. Even scarier is Gordon, the scientist played by Viola Davis, who has seen whatever catastrophe overtook the station and does not consider Kelvin part of the solution. In his gullibility will he believe his wife has somehow really been resurrected? And ... what does the planet want? Why does it do this? As a favor, or as a way of luring us into accepting manifestations of its own ego and need? Will the human race eventually be replaced by the Solaris version? Clooney has successfully survived being named People magazine's sexiest man alive by deliberately choosing projects that ignore that image. His alliance with Soderbergh, both as an actor and co-producer, shows a taste for challenge. Here, as Kelvin, he is intelligent, withdrawn, sad, puzzled. Certain this seems to be his wife, and although he knows intellectually that she is not, still--to destroy her would be ... inhuman. The screenplay develops a painful paradox out of that reality. The genius of Lem's underlying idea is that the duplicates, or replicants, or whatever we choose to call them, are self-conscious and seem to carry on with free will from the moment they are evoked by the planet. Rheya, for example, says, "I'm not the person I remember. I don't remember experiencing these things." And later, "I'm suicidal because that's how you remember me." In other words, Kelvin gets back not his dead wife, but a being who incorporates all he knows about his dead wife, and nothing else, and starts over from there. She has no secrets because he did not know her secrets. If she is suicidal, it is because he thought she was. The deep irony here is that all of our relationships in the real world are exactly like that, even without the benefit of Solaris. We do not know the actual other person. What we know is the sum of everything we think we know about them. Even empathy is perhaps of no use; we think it helps us understand how other people feel, but maybe it only tells us how we would feel, if we were them. At a time when many American movies pump up every fugitive emotion into a clanging assault on the audience, Soderbergh's "Solaris" is quiet and introspective. There are some shocks and surprises, but this is not "Alien." It is a workshop for a discussion of human identity. It considers not only how we relate to others, but how we relate to our ideas of others--so that a completely phony, non-human replica of a dead wife can inspire the same feelings that the wife herself once did. That is a peculiarity of humans: We feel the same emotions for our ideas as we do for the real world, which is why we can cry while reading a book, or fall in love with movie stars. Our idea of humanity bewitches us, while humanity itself stays safely sealed away into its billions of separate containers, or "people." When I saw Tarkovsky's original film, I felt absorbed in it, as if it were a sponge. It was slow, mysterious, confusing, and I have never forgotten it. Soderbergh's version is more clean and spare, more easily readable, but it pays full attention to the ideas and doesn't compromise. Tarkovsky was a genius, but one who demanded great patience from his audience as he ponderously marched toward his goals. The Soderbergh version is like the same story freed from the weight of Tarkovsky's solemnity. And it evokes one of the rarest of movie emotions, ironic regret.
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101 of 118 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Intriguing mood piece, December 8, 2002
Since nobody had the wherewithal or wisdom to re-release "2001" in the actual year 2001, a remake of Andrei Tarkovsky's comparable "Solaris" in 2002 would seem the next best thing. Like those two earlier films, Steven Soderbergh's latest work is something of an "art" science fiction film, far more concerned with philosophy and theme than with action and suspense. This may make the film a tough slog for modern day audiences who have been conditioned to be jolted out of their seats every five minutes while watching films of this genre. But for the deeper thinkers among us, "Solaris" offers a fairly intriguing sci-fi vision of the afterlife, a sort of new religious paradigm for the twenty-first century. George Clooney stars as Chris Kelvin, a successful psychiatrist whose mentally ill wife - ironically enough, given his profession - killed herself a few years back. Chris is commissioned to travel to a space station orbiting the planet Solaris after strange things begin happening to the crew aboard the ship. It turns out that dead loved ones have started appearing to the people there, leading a number of the crewmembers to descend into madness and, in the worst cases, even commit suicide. It's not long before Chris' own dead wife, Rheya, arrives on the scene, prompting him to question whether she is real, a replica created for an unknown reason by the forces of the mysterious planet, or merely a figment of his own troubled conscience and imagination. The film taps into that desire we all have of somehow being miraculously reunited with a deceased love one. We can't help but be moved by Chris' intense desire to believe that all that is happening is real and that life with this person could indeed start back up where it left off. Clooney does a beautiful job conveying the inner struggle between the grieving husband who wants to reconnect emotionally with this strangely familiar woman whom he had thought forever lost to him and the rationalistic scientist who suspects that both she and their relationship are illusory and ephemeral. The film itself may be glacially paced, but the tension created by the situation pulls us through. Natascha McElhone brings an ethereal beauty to the role of the dead wife, and we are moved by her own confusion as to whether she is really this woman Rheya or merely some fabrication usurping the memories and feelings of someone long gone from the scene. Clooney and McElhone generate a strong romantic chemistry between them, both in the scenes aboard the ship and in the manifold flashbacks the storytellers use to reveal their relationship back on Earth. Viola Davis gives an intense performance as Helen Gordon, the rationalist of the group who tries to convince Chris that he must overcome his feelings and destroy this facsimile of Rheya or risk bringing potential destruction to the people back home. "Solaris" has been shot in the widest screen ratio I have seen in years. It almost feels like one of those old Cinerama pictures from the 1950's and 1960's, which is surprising actually, given the fact that, for all its outer space trappings, the film is really an intimate, personal drama in quality and scale (if you rent this on video, do NOT opt for the "full screen" treatment; rather, make sure it is in the letterboxed format). Also, the set design and special effects are actually rather understated for a modern science fiction film - as is everything about "Solaris" in fact. Like "2001," "Solaris" is filled with images and concepts whose significance and meaning aren't always readily apparent or easily spelled out for the audience. Just be forewarned that the film is more along the lines of a tone poem than a rip-roaring action adventure tale. "Solaris" isn't a great film and I can certainly see why many people, expecting something different, might find themselves becoming restive and bored by it. For me, the film managed to seep under my skin and kept me interested most of the time. This is definitely not everyone's cup of tea, but for those with patience and an appreciation for something a little different, "Solaris" has its share of rewards.
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