Solaris

It's now been some years since I last watched it. Still, I can't get rid of the impressions of emptiness, absurdity and impossibility to understand (the world, and the human mind) that this movie left into me. It can be violent to your mind, without showing a single violent image (by the way, I often see this movie as a counterpart to Clockwork Orange, even more than to 2001). It can stun you, with ten or twenty minutes of incomprehensible silence. It can deprive you of any certainty in the laws of nature - such as, people only die once - and thus leave you vulnerable and naked.

I know that many friends to whom I've shown this move did not understand it. So I'm not saying you'll like it. But this is possibly the best (non-action) sci-fi movie ever made.

Watch it at night, alone, when everything out of your home is dark, silent, and cold.

Haven't seen any other Tarkofsky. I hear that this is the film he is least fond of. I intend to see more of him.

As some other reviewer said, I had the feeling through the first one hour or so that some scenes went on for too long, or seemed a bit unnecessary and that it was too slow for the message to clearly be presented. But after a while, the slow pacing DID have a positive impact on the context of the film and on the "dialogue" between the film and the viewer. Anyway, after its plain & simple beginning, when the "action" is taken to the space station things get more and more interesting. No spoon-feeding here, as well. If you want all the mysteries in a film to be solved and explained, then you might not wanna see this, because the film is up to the viewer to think and dive in deep. Anyway, it ended up satisfying and leaving one in thoughts.

I am so glad I got to see this fabulous thoughtful movie. It's full of nice visuals and context. A recommendation to all who are fed up with Hollywood crap - but even Hollywood geeks could find many in this, if they can tolerate with the slow pace...

I'm just starting out into the vast world of foreign film and having seen this film on many a video store shelf, and knowing that it was considered a sci-fi classic, I thought it would be a good way to spend an evening. Based on the case I was expecting something along the line of typical American sci-fi. Needless to say I was wrong.

I watched Solyaris twice in two days, because the first time I saw it I knew that I hadn't processed even a quarter of what I knew was there. I was taken completely aback. The second viewing was extremely rewarding.

It was unusual for me, raised as I was on the sledgehammer moralizing and we'll make our point so obvious that there's no way you can miss it because we have no respect for your intelligence way of American film. I'm a huge literature buff, and this was one of the very few films I've confronted that is thoughtful and has so many things to say yet does it in a literary or poetic fashion.

You will get out of this film what you bring to it. I've been to so many movies where the audience is not actually participating, it's being attacked. But true art is not domineering; it woos you.

So to sum up, I greatly appreciated Tarkovsky's unwillingness to manipulate the viewer. It showed that he had respect for me as a thinking soul, and it is this love and respect for humanity which makes this a truly great film.

This line from Dr Zhivago says all you have to know about Tarkovsky. He was a thinker and a poet. An artist who's work was at once smart, engaging and aesthetically beautiful! Solaris is a world that materialized thoughts and absorbs creatures into its own consciousness. "Solaris" is an allegory on man's place in the universe, the twisted concept of reality, the meaning of love, grief and - ultimately - life. Psychiatrist Kris Kelvin goes to the station orbiting the planet-entity to assess whether the madness of it's occupants means all exploration should be discontinued. What he finds there are all the demons he has brought with him. You the viewer shall experience the same thing, for Solaris is an inviting and questioning but never manipulative film. What you'll get out of it depends on what you bring with you.

Solaris is often accused of being slow. This is a common misinterpretation: Solaris makes you anxious, and willingly so. Too many segments are like mirrors that invite your mind to venture off into many uncomfortable a place (the traffic scene comes to mind: an allegory for the space voyage but also for fading life and powerlessness). Solaris also makes you fear, with a sense that something isn't quite right and as with the best horror films, what you dread often isn't even on screen. Solaris makes you heart ache on several occasions as well. It makes you miss loved ones and it makes you feel homesick. every additional minute that separates you from the gorgeous opening shots of nature makes you long for Earth.

Solaris is many things but above all it is simply more than entertainment: it is a voyage for the senses, like a favorite song that binds countless disconnected feelings and thoughts. It is a poem.

It's tough to come into a film like "Solaris" without tremendous expectations after having heard for so long about its greatness. If you don't immediately feel like it's one of the best movies you've ever seen -- after hearing so many say it is -- you're either tempted to overcompensate and exaggerate how overrated it is out of a sense of defensiveness, or think something's wrong with you for being the only one not to "get it."

As with most movies that have been saddled with the word "greatness," I understand why "Solaris" is considered to be such a watershed movie and so revered by so many, but I have to admit that I didn't personally feel myself responding to it all that much. Maybe I would on a second (or third or fourth) viewing, but I can't say I'm very compelled to watch it again. It's cerebral and philosophical, which I expected, and a bit cold and emotionally uninvolving despite the fact that it's about almost nothing but human emotions and how we react to life's biggest mysteries. I didn't warm much to the characters or ever really think of them as individual human beings so much as necessary conduits for communicating the film's philosophical ruminations. Despite being set in the vast reaches of space, it's a claustrophobic movie, which I think is intentional. We never see space, only the cramped interiors of a spaceship, and that feels right, since the movie is more about the vast universe contained within Man's head than it is about the great physical universe beyond our solar system's borders.

What I liked most about "Solaris" is that it suggests that Man isn't really developed enough to handle breakthroughs in our understanding of the larger universe. Given the chance to explore space and engage with elements beyond our comprehension, the characters in the movie instead spend all of their time ruminating over and regretting the people they left behind on Earth and the mistakes they made there. It's almost like Mankind turns to solving giant huge mysteries as a distraction from the fact that we're not capable of cracking the lesser, more mundane mysteries of everyday life, like love, commitment, and dependence on one another.

"Solaris" does have one chilling and memorable ending, I'll give it that. If we go poking around in what we don't understand, it seems to say, we may very well find ourselves unable to return to what we do.

Grade: A-