Solaris
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Movie Reviews of Solaris
Movie Review: Visitors from Memory Ask What is Life?
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Movie Review: Hypnotic
Summary: 5 Stars
This 2002 version of SOLARIS is everything the 1972 Russian version wasn't. Indeed, this latest release resonates with me more and more as I dwell upon it.Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) is a psychiatrist going through the daily motions. Then, he receives a video message from his friend Gibarian (Ulrich Tukur) beseeching his help out on the space research station circling the planet Solaris. Gibarian doesn't specify the problem, but two astronauts have already perished.
On his arrival at Solaris, Kelvin discovers that Gibarian has since committed suicide. Only the station's commander, Dr. Helen Gordon (Viola Davis), and Snow (Jeremy Davies) remain alive. Gordon is locked in her cabin, reluctant to come out. Snow seems in a world of his own, curiously semi-detached from reality.
Chris is soon confronted with the presence of Visitors, physical manifestations created by the planet Solaris of humans residing within the memories of the space station crew. For example, there's the young "son" of Gibarian, and the "brother" of Snow. We never learn who Gordon's Visitor is.
Kelvin awakens one day to his own Visitor, his wife Rheya (Natascha McElhone), who'd previously committed suicide back on Earth after an acrimonious verbal confrontation with her spouse. Chris, who loved her dearly, has been weighed down with her loss.
The power of the SOLARIS story lies in the concept of a life form created from the another's psyche. As Rheya puts it to Chris, her existence and essence is solely dependent on his memory of her. The viewer watches as Rheya mentally discovers who she is via Kelvin's memories, fed to her (and the viewer) in flashback form by, presumably, the planet's intelligence. Poignantly, Rheya - a tragic figure - is profoundly saddened that all she'll ever be is determined by Kelvin's recollections, that she'll never know the rest of herself. Chris, on the other hand, mired in the twin emotions of guilt and love, clings to his resurrected "wife". As he admits to her, "I don't know anymore if you're truly Rheya; I only see you."
The 2002 version of this film is, mercifully, 70 minutes shorter than the 169-minute 1972 edition, which dragged on interminably. Plus, the planetary special FX are better, and the interior of the space station doesn't look like something clunky out of the Soviet 50s. Clooney, who delivers one of his best performances, benefits from being familiar to American audiences, something Donatas Banionis in the earlier Russian release wasn't. McElhone, a relatively unknown actress, has a stunning, mature beauty worthy of any man's obsession. Davis is powerful as Dr. Gordon, a realist who knows what must be done if the station's survivors are to live. Davies gives a measured and brilliant performance as the detached Snow, who provides a surprise of his own.
In the mind of every human being resides the memory of another, who was more dear than life itself, who will perhaps occupy his/her dying thoughts. Who would your Visitor be on the Solaris station? The creators of this unique, love story - for that's what it is - have perhaps distilled for the cinema the essence of the original Stanislaw Lem novel into this question.
I like this film more than I can adequately say.
Movie Review: the voice from beyond
Summary: 5 Stars
As a big Stanislaw Lem fan as I am, I was really curious to see this new movie based on his famous novel. While not his best novel (this honour IMHO should be awarded to "His Master's Voice" or "Futurological Congress"), still stands out among the best of thought-provoking science fiction. As always, more questions than answers here, but these questions refer to very essence of our consciousness and our relation to the outside world (is there any outside world? Read later about the final sequences of the movie). The main problem with the novel is its complexity; attempting to make a modest, not overlong movie, one has to choose the most important thread and leave the rest aside. This task was accomplished masterfully here. To complain the movie isn't a simple equivalent of novel would be more than ridiculous. I think the older Tarkowski's version was this failed attempt to reflect the novel in all its complexity. It became overlong, filled with pseudo-philosophical blah blah and therefore hardly tolerable as the whole although I must admit it had its moments. I think my feelings are justified by Stanislaw Lem himself. During the making of Russian version, the Russians invited Lem to Moscow as a consultant, to make sure the movie would fit ideas of the novel. Lem found virtually everything bad and irrelevant, from screenplay to the very concept and the way it evolved. Tarkowski, the great artist himself, did not even want to argue, not to mention follow any Lem's hints. After a week or so completely counterproductive stay in Moscow, and after a subsequent show of the movie in statu nascendi, Lem got so irritated that he started to stamp his feet and scream "fools! Fools! You do not understand anything!". He left Moscow and never wanted to see Tarkowski again.The god of science fiction, now in his eighties, but as wise and intelligent as ever, found this Soderbergh's version very good and totally relevant. I am pretty sure everybody who knows what is Lem all about will fully appreciate this movie. Especially its "dream in a dream" atmosphere, when you do not know at all what is real and what is just a dream (a trademark Lem's plot, check some of his short stories or "Futurological Congress" to know what I'm. talking about). Up to the final scene - is it "real" or it is just re-made in God-Ocean's consciousness while the spaceship endlessly falls down into singularity...
The beautiful, atmospheric score builds up the atmosphere of "quiet restlessness" prevalent through the movie, this "something from beyond" feeling. The actors play their roles perfectly, I would even dare to say it was the best, most imaginative and subtle performance of George Clooney I have ever seen.
This movie will flop for sure; its primal sin is that it was made in Hollywood, so it was expected to be quite different. It won't be also praised by critics; they like intellectual movies in the vein of "American Beauty" or "Talk To Her", much more pretentious and artificial.
This is too ethereal, too "from beyond" to fit their tastes, but will be a cult movie sooner or later.
Igor Kurowski
Movie Review: Extremely thought provoking especially the ending
Summary: 5 Stars
This movie truly astonished me and I just don't get all the negative reviews. I've even seen serious critics complain that it didn't develop the relationship between the two principle characters enough. So what? That's like saying that Fargo is flawed because it never explained why Jerry Lundegaard was in such financial difficulties. That misses the point entirely.My 25 year old son warned me against seeing this. But I think his problem was that he was looking for a space opera like Star Wars or Star Trek Strikes Again. This is not a space action adventure, although it IS visually stunning and the music is glorious, I don't care if it is derivative (I would say the music is more an homage to 2001 than an imitation). So instead of an action adventure where special effects are an end in itself, this movie presents some really intruiging ideas about an alien life force (not life form, except in the guise of mystical looking, whispy clouds shrouding the planet Solaris) that seems desperately to want to "fix things up" when individuals from an intelligence species like homo sapiens misunderstand each other resulting in tragic consequences. The logical conclusion of this "procedure" just blew me away as portrayed in the last fifteen minutes of this movie, which I will not reveal as it should come as a total surprise to the viewer, although in hindsight there were hints enough that it could come to this, and then you have to wonder about the validity of human self-identity and the relativity of our own individuality. You will also be wondering about the "morality" of this kind of redemption. Is it good, or is it bad? I really have to wonder, which is why I look forward to viewing the movie again and again when it comes out on DVD.
As you can perhaps see from my review, what is really going on in this movie is actually philosophically rather abstract, and so the many criticisms of this movie on concrete points are really irrelevant. This will probably be a box office flop because it will take too long for the good things about it to get around, and the movie industry has little patience when a movie doesn't immediately start dragging in tens of millions the first week. But I predict it will become a cult hit on DVD, as people buy it and watch it ten times or more just to go through the experience of contemplating all the cosmic and philosophical issues the movie raises.
I might add that I never read the book and did not see the original movie. This movie stands on its own and I am sad to see that the original movie ruined the experience of this movie for so many others. I remember how disappointed I was seeing the movie "Tom Jones" when it first came out because, as happenstance would have it, I'd just read the book. I saw the movie twenty years later and realized then that it is a masterpiece. I've since become very skeptical about people criticizing a movie simply because it wasn't like the original or betrayed the book. Sometimes movies are mere inspirations from previous works, and so should always be judged on their own merits, as hard as this often is to do.
Movie Review: Metaphysical and cerebral science fiction
Summary: 5 Stars
With the way that movie storylines are these days, it was refreshing and elightening to know that a science fiction film that dealt with metaphysical and cerebral matters was being released around November of 2002 AD. Especially the fact that Kentucky native George Clooney was the lead actor in the production, along with the lovely British actress Natascha McElhone. In many ways, this was more entertaining and watchable than your average Star Wars and Star Trek film.Much like 2001, but with some romantic overtones, Steven Soderbergh's Solaris is an interesting mix of metaphysical and cerebral science fiction, with a love story thrown in. Not only was the storyline very solid and multi-dimensional, the sets, the costumes, the special visual effects, and soundtrack were all beautiful. The actors and actresses did a remarkable job in the roles, along with the material they were given.
Based on Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem's novel, Solaris tells the story of a 21st Century psychologist who receives a message from a scientist friend of his on a space station orbiting a mysterious planet named Solaris. Chris Kelvin, the psychologist is asked by his friend if he could come to the space station named Prometheus and find out what is going on. Apparently, some strange and unusual incidents have been occuring.
Still recovering from the tragic death of his wife, Kelvin journeys to the space station and discovers the fact that his friend has mysteriously died, one of the scientists is acting irrationally, and the other is frightened. While determining the cause of all of the events, Chris is suddenly visited by an image of his deceased wife. From there, Chris and the two surviving scientists determine that the ocean planet they are orbiting his a sentient form of life that is recreating the images of those from a tragic moment in their past. As to why this alien intelligence is committing these acts, remains an unknown factor.
I haven't seen Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 version of the film, so I really can't compare this film with the older version. I can say this, it helps to read the book first before viewing the film. I can honestly say that I enjoyed Soderbergh's version of Solaris. Not only does the film stay true to Lem's book in some levels, it also paints an interesting picture in Freudian terms. It states an interesting fact about how well do we know other people and at the same time how well we know ourselves. In all honesty, this was probably the best film out of 2002! It may have the qualities of a science fiction art house film, but it is still entertaining. One that I look forward to purchasing on DVD this summer.
If you enjoy science fiction that makes you think, instead of the ususal shoot them and blow them up types, then you will be pleased with Solaris. It will make you think and it will astound your mind.