Solaris

Story Something is wrong on the space station orbiting the mysterious planet Solaris, so Chris Kelvin (Clooney) goes there, all alone, to find out what's going on and to persuade the crew to come home. Turns out, when one is near Solaris, one tends to see dead people--or duplicates thereof. In Kelvin's case, this would be a doppelganger of his deceased wife, Rheya (McElhone), which seems to have Rheya's personality traits and memories.

I had heard that Solaris was excruciatingly slow and, consequently, unbearably boring, but I didn't quite agree. I understood that many shots were included or extended to set the mood, and to illustrate thought and memory, and it was all visually interesting. I could see, for example, where Soderbergh showed his love for Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey with lingering shots of Clooney in an astronaut's helmet, patterns of light reflected on its glass. However I would have traded the extra hour of atmospherics for a deeper exploration of the intriguing questions the premise raised. When we say we love someone, are we saying we love the sum of the person's characteristics? Were we to lose our loved one, would a twin with the same likes, dislikes, and quirks be a suitable replacement? Would you want to live on in the memories of your friends and family or, as Woody Allen prefers, to live on in your apartment? This film seems less interested in delving into these mysteries than it is in portraying grief and subjective memory. Valid objectives, but Solaris left me wanting to see an episode of the similarly themed Caprica (of which I've only seen the pilot movie).

Why you should see it You never got over that crush you developed on Clooney during his tenure on ER. You're in the mood for a visual poem of love and loss. You enjoy any movie set in outer space. You're the founder of Jeremy Davies/Dr. Faraday Fan Club.

Why you should avoid it Star Trek: The Next Generation was set in outer space too. Pick an episode and it will lead you through a debate of life's big questions, in half the time.

--from my review at www.1man365movies.com

My two favorite examples of Hollywood utterly destroying GREAT foreign films are Vanilla Sky and City of Angels, which were abominations of two of my favorite films - Open Your Eyes and Wings of Desire. If you've seen Tarkovsky's brilliant "Solyaris" this film will seem more like an Americanized tribute than a Hollywoodization of a great piece of Soviet cinema. Some will likely ask why Soderbergh bothered to make this film if he couldn't improve on the original. Personally, I could not care less. This is a great film, and shows that it is possible for Americans to remake classic non-American films sensitively, intelligently and well.

To cut to the chase - if you like sci-fi with a soul,which stretches the boundaries of imagination, explores the uncharted realms of the human condition as much as the unknown realities of the universe, and swims upstream against the currents of ethics, physics, and even metaphysics, you will probably enjoy this moody, slow, multi-leveled and heavily textured film. If you're looking for light entertainment, stay away from this. This is a slow, intense film - dominated by dialog - and there is no action to speak of. Also, you need to let this movie pour into you slowly, so if you're not in the right frame of mind to pay attention and be receptive, you should save it for another occasion.

The cast is exceptionally good. This is unequivocally the best performance I have seen out of George Clooney, but the supporting cast and the female lead all blew me away. Soderbergh does have a talent for making actor's look good, even mediocre actors, but there is nothing mediocre about any of the performances in this film.

Though I recognize his talent, Soderberg's dialogical technique has worn particularly thin with me. The once fresh fast-paced, rapid-fire cuts and close-ups with the low-toned exchange of sentence fragments, and the myriad Soderberg imitators, particularly in television crime drama, have really gotten on my nerves. Solaris, however, is a bit different. There are only a few "Soderbergh moments" in this rich remake of the classic bit of 1970s soviet SciFi "Solyaris". Both films are based on a novella by the brilliant Stanislaw Lem. This film, perhaps even more than Tarkovsky's 1972 edgy, dark, and intense original, will appeal to exactly the sort of movie-goer that Lem's writing appeals to. Neither film captures Lem's quirky sense of humor. I am quite glad that Soderbergh chose to make Solaris with very much the same atmospheric eeriness, plot, and intellectual and emotional depth as the original. It is a tribute to his artistic integrity that he recognizes the brilliance of the original work, and imitates it wherever he can do no better, adding subtle and appropriate nuances and embellishments to make it his own. Some examples are the wonderfully minimalistic soundtrack, and the very Soderbergh symbolic use of lighting and color saturation to shift from the retrospective to the live-action shot. Perhaps the best tribute I can give this film is the fact that I am going to watch the original again in a few days for comparative purposes.

In other words, this isn't going to be for everybody, nor, even, for most. I am hardly surprised by the very low (in my opinion) ratings received by this film here on IMDb. Solaris is a love story, a story of exploring the fringes of sanity, and of questioning the very nature of reality, and much more. Enjoy it!

While Soderbergh's Solaris may well be a work of art in its own right, I certainly pity those who haven't read the book or at least seen Tarkovsky's 1972 original adaptation, which is a lot more faithful to Lem's novel in its scope, if not in its vision. Soderbergh has managed to leave out just about everything that could justify the title (as Lem himself put it, if he had set out to write a book about space romance, he would have called it Love in Outer Space, not Solaris). So if you want to know the story, go and read the novel.

That said, I enjoyed Jeremy Davis as Snow, and the score is very good.

The state of human minds has always been so abstract and never easy an easy subject to comprehend. It's even more complex to decipher on screen. Nope, this film is not strictly a ghost story, nor is it a Star Trek adventure story to interest most science-fiction craving fans. Don't expect to see the usual Hollywood sweet romantic tale either! This film focuses on the psychological journey faced by the despaired and unstable minds. It's a film that totally relies on the characters' emotions and reactions. Awesome!

Has Steven Soderbergh succeeded in sprucing up Andrei Tarkovski's 1972 psychological cult sci-fi classic to make it worth the while to pay a regular price of a tix? Can't really say, as I've never seen the Russian version. But I was truly mesmerized by this film's approach to what, I think, is the study of human insanity slipping beyond saving.

The film is slow in pace and lengthy, with stretches of tedious silence, letting the imagination of the viewers try understand what happened to each of the characters seen, or heard. Silence comes with such intensity that it works very proficiently in this film. There are dazzlingly and ecstatically artistic visual moments to offer that dreamlike stance. At other times, Soderbergh provides a more solid spectrum allowing the viewers to grasp intellectually the conflicts faced by the human minds - Kelvin, Snow and Gordon - as a result of some traumatically emotional events. Viewers are told that Dr. Gibarian has already committed suicide. These may all be psychologists, but they all seem to exhibit signs of stress and paranoia. Oh yes, the psychological intent of the film's contents is truly complex and we are slowly led to see who will finally be capable of making the right choice, and escape insanity. Earth, presumably, is a symbol of normality!

It's about the existential exploration of the minds' sufferings, almost as if the memories of the human mind are being driven to a test. It's reliving a past and letting memories play tricks on the minds. It's living on regrets, hoping they could rewind the clock backward to bring about changes to events that are gradually driving the victims to complete madness. Indeed, a very haunting! Almost like the work of Bergman, Ophuls, Kubrick, and Welles, Soderbergh brings a well-crafted mysticism to the screen.... as if to to say that only one out of many entering a mental asylum can ever hoped to be cured. This film is very hypnotically effective and unique! Solaris - seemingly like an alien memory-stimulating anthropomorphic life form - is so eerily powerful on the screen. It's the `mirror that reflects' what the mind is not willing to forget. It's the driving force to the human insanity.

George Clooney is simply awesome. Follow his Kelvin as he deals with the issues of love, fear and death. It deals with his choice to throw away every memory of his past or to cling to them. That's to say he has the choice to allow his memories to manipulate him, or throw them out altogether. I find it hardly possible not to get totally absorbed with Clooney's character. Scary as it may sound, ghostly memories are never easy to shake off and thus lead men to more deadly conditions. Sometimes for these beings, their choice of death becomes their ultimate solution of finding peace. The performances of the ensemble of cast are solid, but the dialogue is the strength of the film, providing hints to what actually is happening to the characters.

An intriguingly engaging film - that's my opinion, of course! The narrative progression is nicely eloquent and the ending is impressive - providing the viewers with the feeling of having unraveled the mystery and capture the relief. It's certainly not a film for everybody... especially for those who dislike deciphering abstract ploys in films. Readers of Jung and Freud may find this film interesting as it supports the theory that conflict arises within the mind, mental health and illness, dominance, creativity and hearing voices. Fan of Clooney may miss his usual extraordinary charm and wit, but I'd say, thumbs up to him for his courageous choice to engage the viewers with his talent in exhibiting his emotional expressions.

A brilliant film!

Since I had just read Lem's novel Solaris and had in the past seen the 1972 Russian movie Solyaris, I was interested in seeing the new Solaris. Someone not familiar with the story may well be baffled by the movie. Those who have read the book will recognize the plot up to close to the end, where the movie veers off in its own attempt for a resolution that Lem did not seem to think necessary to provide in the novel.

I was disappointed that the movie had almost nothing to say or show about the sentient ocean of Solaris and humanity's failure to comprehend it. The book went into great detail in describing the fantastic phenomena of the ocean and the various failed theories to explain them. In fact I think that was the central theme of the book which is almost completely lost in the movie.