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Solaris [VHS]

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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.

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.

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.

Solaris is a film that not everyone will walk away embracing. Many will, in fact, walk away loathing it, carrying a reaction of boredom and anger at wasting their money to see it. But others, such as myself, will come away delighted from a wonderful, cerebral film that carries with it a heavy question: What would you do if you could regain an artificial version of something you lost?

The reason many will hate Solaris is because of its deliberately slow pace with little action or dialogue. Everything spoken and seen has a significant purpose, not a moment is wasted. And many expecting a certain genre of film won't get what they want out of it, either. It isn't science fiction exactly, and it's not really a romance or horror. It's a film that takes elements of all these to create a simple story about irreplaceable loss and what you might do if you somehow found a way to replace it with a shadow of its former self.

The film, a remake of a 1972 film of the same name, and based on a book by Stanislaw Lem, follows psychiatrist Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) who is assigned to visit a space station orbiting the planet Solaris. Something strange is going on and a team sent to investigate it never returned. Kelvin, who has some experience with the crew, is the owning company's last chance before giving up on the station. When Kelvin arrives, there are only two crew members left. When his deceased wife suddenly appears at his bedside, Kelvin gets wrapped up in the strange goings-on, and tries to get to the bottom of things. But one of the themes of this film is some things in life have no answers, as Kelvin soon discovers. What really makes this film work is the way it presents questions and ideas such as these, leaving the audience time to ponder them. As Kelvin learns his resurrected wife isn't quite real, the viewer is forced to consider if they would want to live with an imitation of a lost love, or rely only on memories. And the question of the accuracy of memory is also raised. How well do we remember how people truly were?

What really aides the tone of Solaris is its mixing of genres. There are many science fiction touches, and the film seems to use much of the visual style of 2001, A Space Odyssey. But the experience is more human and intimate then that large scale film. It uses some horror elements, including an unsettling score and a potentially scary situation, much like in the film Event Horizon. But it never becomes in your face scary, it's held back a notch. There is romance through flashbacks, as Kelvin remembers the love he once had, and how he lost it. But the somber tone drowns out any happiness there once was. This mix, combined with wonderfully scripted yet simple dialogue create a haunting atmosphere that will open the door to hours of discussion after the film. Much of that discussion will revolve around the film's cryptic ending. It's a conclusion that everyone will have to decide for themselves what happens. After all, as the film so eloquently states, there are no answers, only choices.

The film uses some simple methods to keep the story flowing and avoid confusion. Most apparent is the use of blue lighting on the station, and yellow lighting on Earth to keep straight the flashbacks with present time. The results are subtle but unmistakable. Also, director Steven Soderbergh wisely keeps the film length exceptionally short, as the slow pacing of the film, a necessity to its subject, makes the film seem longer then it is. The acting is also top notch. With a very small cast, Clooney plays his role perfectly, seeming to carry a great weight of grief throughout, and Jeremy Davies as one of the remaining crew members manages to bring a little light-heartedness to the dreary nature of the film.

As stated before, this film isn't for everyone. If you look at film as simply entertainment, then skip Solaris. But if you want to see something intelligent, thought provoking and stunningly beautiful, then Solaris is highly recommended.

Apparently, a lot of viewers got frustrated with this film. One review on Amazon said, "Why did Clooney's wife commit suicide? I don't get it."

If you plan to see this movie on DVD, keep this in mind: There is a reason why the dialogue and the general pace of the movie is a bit slow and deliberate. It's not going to hit you in the face, but there is a lot of subtext to the dialogue. Savor the moment, and a lot of the answers will come, although this film does not attempt to answer every question it raises.

(As to why Natascha McElhone's character commits suicide, there are subtle clues in her conversations with Clooney in their bedroom and in what looks like a Wal-Mart.)

This is one of those terrific movies that may be puzzling at first but reveals itself more and more with each viewing. If you rent it, watch it twice. It'll grow on you. I also recommend seeing the 1972 version for comparison's sake.

Besides the stunning cinematography, elegant dialogue and graceful acting, it's a movie you can personalize and interpret in your own unique way -- Soderbergh leaves a lot to the audience's own perceptions. Clooney absolutely shines in this film in a role unlike any other he's played -- he creates a palpable aura of grief and pain with few words and a total lack of histrionics. I can't praise Natascha McElhone enough for pulling off an incredibly challenging role. (How can you convincingly play a woman who has someone else's memories and none of her own? She does it with aplomb. I cannot imagine better casting.)

It's not a chick flick, it's not a science fiction film of the aliens/robots/gadgets variety ... it's really in a unique category of its own. Love it or hate it, there are few films as thought-provoking or affecting as Solaris.

I was not very convinced when I went to see the movie because I did not think that George Clooney was a good choice for the main part. Clooney carries with him this stereotype of a modern Don Juan that does not lend itself well for a drama such as Solaris.
As soon as the story got going, however, Don Juan was totally erased both from my mind and from the scared psychologist walking the corridors of the space station.
I'm not trying to sell Clooney. Actually I think that all the actors playing characters present on the space station did an outstanding job. This is one of the elements that make this movie a success. Every single expression, slight movement, silence, carries true meaning.
The special effects that bring the outer space and planet background into the film are done well enough that I didn't notice imperfections. I think that Steven Soderbergh was right at keeping this aspect of the movie secondary, otherwise it might have become a disturbing element. This said, I enjoyed the nice shots at Solaris added here and there because they contributed to the overall mystery.
And the music. It's haunting. I kept looking for a pattern and couldn't find it. However the music seeped through my being while I was busy with the pictures and really got to me. I would hesitate buying the soundtrack, by the way, because I'm afraid that the sound without the images may not work so well. But the marriage of the two is one of the best I have experienced.
The pace is slow but I kept having to catch my breath, so captured I was.
To conclude, I would say that not all will like this movie. I brought my date with me and it turned out to be a mistake. She was annoyed. So this may be turn out to be a case of all or nothing; you will either hate it or love it.
A last comment: don't go see it if you're depressed.

I'm really not surprised to see so many negative reviews for this wonderful, dreamlike film; it's certainly not for everyone, especially those who prefer their films pre-digested & undemanding. But for those who are willing to give themselves over to its rich, subtle rhythms, an astonishing experience awaits. An extended meditation on love, loss & memory, this film takes the viewer deep into the heart of Being, far below the trivial layers of the Everyday. George Clooney gives a superb & nuanced performance: a modern Everyman struggling with grief & the limitations of his own imagination, he hopes for that precious second chance we all long for so desperately ... and does he find it? Like so many of the questions raised by this film, the answers are yours to determine.

Walt Whitman once said, "Great poems demand great audiences." And so it is with this film: passive, spoon-fed viewers need not watch. The filmmaker trusts in the intelligence & depth of soul of those who do watch. Everything contributes to the establishing & sustaining of its mood: gorgeous cinematography, haunting music, a tasteful underplaying of special effects.

No, it's not Tarkovsky's masterpiece -- but it's not meant to be, either. Rather it directs a fine & powerful focus on one aspect of its source material, striving for & achieving an emotionally luminous work of Art. Highly recommended!

When I read Stanislaw Lem's book many years ago I remember Solaris as a living ocean with peculiar qualities. The planet somehow managed an unstable orbit between two stars. This is what caught earth's scientist's attention in the first place. Part of the search for intelligent life in the cosmos. Lem's intelligent life is wonderfully baffling. He looks at the human need to personify and communicate. But to communicate something you have to have some common ground. Lem's stunning premise was to look at an attempt at human-alien communication very uncompromisingly.

Soderbergh focusses the movie on the question, "How do we perceive ourselves and others and how vital is this to the communication process?" Lem and Soderbergh both see the story from the eys of Psychiatrist Kelvin [Clooney]. Soderbergh's opening scenes stress this man's grief and attempts to recover from his wife's suicide. He's soon asked by a long time astronaut friend for help with a delicate situation on a space station orbiting Solaris. Wham! In no time Kelvin is totally befuddled at the mysteries he sees as he boards the space station. There is almost no dialogue, revealing camera shots period. Two surviving astronauts offer cryptic advice. Snow says "I can tell you what is going on, but that really wouldn't tell you what is going on" Gordon says "Until it happens to you, there is really no point in discussing it". Not much help from our director there. What "happens" is the living ocean presents each astronaut with a dreadful gift.

The alien's "gift" to the earthling's was to generate in near perfect [to atomic] detail, the flesh and blood of whatever life was preoccupying the dreams of the astronauts. Kelvin's visitor is his ex-wife Rheya. Clooney does a great job portraying Kelvin's repulsive reaction at first. He banishes the mysterious woman, who couldn't be anything but a monster. When she soon reappears, he opens his mind and begins dialogue with this person, played with wonderful grace and style by McElhone. The physicist on board is obsessed with figuring out how Solaris achieved these creatures and is hell bent on physically destroying them. Snow's visitor disappeared long back. And Kelvin approaches hs wife at first as a kind of grief therapy and then is slowly drawn into admiring and actually loving her all over again. In consistent professional style, he tries to figure out how his memories of Rheya were manifest by Solaris. Both he and Rheya look at who she is, and who she is becoming. And how she is changing him.

What happens when reality becomes memory, and then memory is slowly warped and faded? And who am I anyway? How well do I know my wife of many many years? And if I leave my kids for four years will I be able to enter their lives as a loving father based on our mutual memories of our past relationship?

The end makes you think about life and death. Intergalactic mixed-species communication is intense and complex. The soundtrack fits. The art draws Solaris as a beautiful floating blue nerve bundle. This movie, like the book, is very imaginative, lively, challenging and original. It casually dances between the spiritual and metaphysical and physical. Not for everybody but this really isn't science fiction. It's something else.

Soderbergh's film has suffered from the widespread misconception that it is a remake of Tarkovsky's 1972 masterpiece. If it were, the criticisms would be quite justified, as Tarkovsky's is, in my opinion, a far superior film.

The confusion lies, I think, in a failure to understand that Tarkovsky's and Soderbergh's films are really just two very different adaptations of Stanislaw Lem's novel. Since I haven't read the novel, I'm in no place to judge which film is a better adaptation, but reviewers (and readers) should keep that very important distinction in mind.

Solaris is proof, like Gattaca, that science fiction movies do not need an overabundance of flashy special effects and futuristic gadgets to be science fiction.

Solaris does more with less. Much shorter than the Russian filmed version, both based on the Stanislaw Lew movel, Solaris is a overlooked gem of a movie that ruthlessly explores the problem that arises. The solution at the end is the only one possible, a transcendental one, but I can't see how any other works for this movie.

I expressed a theory to a co-worker that George Clooney movies where he *doesn't* play the "rogue with a heart of gold" character he is famous for (Out of Sight, Three Kings, O Brother, The Billy Ocean movies, etc) don't seem to do well at the box office, no matter how well the movies are made. Solaris, which only took in $15 million at the US Box office in 2002 (after costing 4 times that to make) seems to fit this mold.

Besides the wonderful acting from Clooney, McElhrone, Davis and Davies, the soundtrack also makes this movie a complete experience. I wish I had picked up the soundtrack the day I saw this in theaters, it is now out of print and expensive to obtain.

And what would *you* do if someone you lost came back to you, someone who was torn away from you?

I know there are those who prefer the Russian version of the film, but, honestly, I find that one slow and tedious. The Soderbergh version is short, tight and spare.


Solaris is one of my favorite movies and I commend the movie to anyone.