Solaris movie review and film summary (1976)
rogerebert.com
rogerebert.com
I love the idea of an alien, presented before us, completely available to us to interact with, and we cannot bridge the gap because we and it are so different.
It just leaves you with "What is it doing?!" which is such a wonderful contrast to the deep emotional impact that its behavior (creating the doppelgangers) has on humans. Does it know? Is it coincidence? Is it malicious? So many good mysteries.
Which was Lem's way of criticizing popular science fiction. Most aliens are either presented as humanoid or monsters from our nightmares. But Solaris is something else entirely. I would say the Arrival aliens are pretty alien as well, even though they do manage to communicate their language to the main character.
In case you haven't read it yet, you might enjoy Peter Watts's Blindsight.
* When they assist the exhausted Kelvin to his room near the end, his body blocks the light but occasionally his body moves so the light can come through and blind the camera. This parallels the discussion about destroying the visitors with a burst of light.
* Burton's extended unexplained car ride is (in my opinion) a nod to the 2001 star-gate. It's quite brilliant how Tarkovsky shows that what Kubrick achieves with exotic special effects can be achieved with everyday footage if we just look from the right angles and play the right soundtrack.
* In the old footage they watch near the start of the film, we see stylistic artwork of important figures in the background. These would certainly be informed by Tarkovsky's expertise on Orthodox Iconography (see his "Andrei Rublev").
* Interesting to compare and contrast the visitors with Kubrick's "HAL". The visitors are purely physical and totally unaware of where they are/what's going on. HAL is purely mental and totally omniscient. Both raise all kinds of interesting metaphysical questions about personality and the soul.
* The swirling water-plants at the beginning and end of the film are evoked by the paper strips the crew hang up on their ventilators.
* Near the beginning, Kelvin stands outside in pouring rain, as if not noticing it, when he could escape it by walking just a few feet. This becomes very meaningful with part of the twist in the ending.
* Young Burton talks about how gigantic the child he saw in Solaris's ocean was. Later, when the visitor is frozen from the dry-ice suicide attempt, we briefly catch a glimpse of her face reflected in a concave mirror which makes it seem monstrously gigantic.
Right now the entire film is available free on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LutMHAeCfLU&t=5193s (turn on closed captions unless you speak Russian)
If anyone can convince me I'm wrong I'd like that.
You're certainly right. All Tarkovsky's films are astonishingly boring. It takes a lot to be able to appreciate that sort of film. Learning to enjoy boredom is one of the greatest things I've developed in my life. It's like a superpower, it enables me to read vast quantities of dry but wonderful nonfiction, for example. I wish I had developed this power decades ago, but maybe that wouldn't have been possible without the necessary life experience.
Is he the one who did the movie for roadside picnic? If so, yea. Also seemed almost completely unrelated to the book.
I need to go back and reread the book because I don't remember the book being so boring
to each their own but why bother? I get a break from work and entertainment from films, I simply can't understand what you're getting out of it.
Tarkovsky, the director, is considered one of the greatest ever. He's not just some random Russian director, or some random 70s director. And he only made seven movies. Based on those facts alone, I would think it'd be worth seeing at least one or two of the seven. If you're into sf your best bets are Solaris or Stalker. Personally I prefer Stalker, but Solaris is also great.
There's plenty more that could be said about Tarkovsky, Solaris, Stalker, or his other films, but for me at least those facts alone would be enough to take a look.
What do you mean unexplained? They clearly were showing the future. The multi-level Tokyo highways were percieved as extremely futuristic by the soviet audience. There was nothing like that in the Union at the time.
And unbearably boring.
Icarus XB 1 (1963) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0122111/
It also has great set design like Solaris but didnt have such a large budget. I love his style, I should read one of his books.
Edit: the full thing is on YouTube https://youtu.be/WwodJW1ikFo
Note, there are two translations of Solaris. The bad one is from 1970, which was translated from Polish to French and then from French into English. All physical print versions of Solaris in English use this translation. In 2011, the first direct translation of Solaris into English was published in audiobook and ebook. It's only available digitally, but this is the one you want to read.
https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/12932gh/my_review_...
I wonder if this is why, among all of the Lem books I have devoured, Solaris was one of my least favorites. I'm going to have to give it another shot.
At least in the American version of Solaris I felt like it asked if what we “know” or remember about a person is real / enough to make a person / how much we can even know…. and by extension what we really know about anything.
And regarding the character in the end who chooses to simply live with those memories/ ghosts created by his memory… maybe he isn’t any different than the rest of us.
The issue is this: According to traditional Christian morality, God can forgive all sins (salvation). Like the fact that Kelvin was partly responsible for the suicide of his wife. But Kelvin doesn't believe in God, this is an outdated thing from the past. So he is left with secular morality, where the only person who can forgive him is the person he affected. But his wife is dead, she can't forgive him anymore. So Kelvin has to live with his guilt.
Except...
Solaris seems to offer him something unbelievable, namely a second chance: A recreation of his wife, so that he can reconcile with her. But if she forgives him, what is this worth? Isn't she just a copy, a different person?
I haven't read or seen the full 1972 version, but does anyone know if this line is in Stanislaw Lem's book?
"“We're proud of ourselves. But when you think about it, our enthusiasm's a sham. We don't want other worlds. We want mirrors.” -it is from the 2002 screenplay, but I am curious if it has any analogue in the Polish book or Russian film.
“We’re humanitarian and noble, we’ve no intention of subjugating other races, we only want to impart our values to them and in return, to appropriate their heritage. We see ourselves as Knights of the Holy Contact. That’s another falsity. We’re not searching for anything except people. We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. One world is enough, even there we feel stifled. We desire to find our own idealized image; they’re supposed to be globes, civilizations more perfect than ours; in other worlds we expect to find the image of our own primitive past.”
https://www.amazon.com/Solaris-Stanislaw-Lem-ebook/dp/B00Q21...
1: https://english.lem.pl/works/novels/solaris/196-a-new-transl...
Much deeper essay, thanks for posting.
This takes nothing away from the original film, which inspired so much of modern scifi. But if you were raised on modern sci fi, Tarkovsky's original is a hard watch. You might feel the same in the nineties listening to Sonic Youth's 80s grunge, or reading Lord of the Rings after you've read the Song of Ice and Fire / Game of Thrones books, or playing System Shock 1 after growing up on Bioshock and Prey.
The original was IMHO plagued with useless lengths and a somewhat pretentious/cryptic tone.
Most good things in art are hard and require some work.
If you want the easy version, you're missing a lot.
You'd be better served to be listening to Sonic Youth's 80s records instead of me-too grunge during the nineties too.
Fritz Lang's Metropolis has a much faster pace and it's a scifi movie from 1927.
* p.s.: Take The Andromeda Strain (1971)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066769/
imho, an absolute gem of Sci-Fi that still works. This is also a 'slow pace' film, there is also a great deal of matter happening inside the characters' heads, but it still works as film. (hn bonus: CalTech and JPL are in the credits.)
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/andrei-tarkovsky-solaris-artist...
* "absolutely hated" was also mentioned /g
The most obvious variation would be shorter still: a film similar to Clooney's remake, but without quite so much development of what was already a dead character (Kelvin's ex) and without the softening of what was objectively a pretty bleak ending. But I think the newer film actually works really well. All the other people who were seated in the theater when I went to see it during its theatrical release seemed to feel the same way. All three of them.
Watching the film again is easy, but the novel is an interesting case. Apparently the best English translation (the only direct translation to English) is not available in print, only as an audio book.
The direct Johnston translation is also available as ebook, the Kindle version uses it. I just looked at it and the writing is still not super fluent for my taste. But this might be due to the fact that it was a mid-early Lem novel. In his later (especially more humorous) books, his writing style got much more witty and playful.
I agree. I have both versions, and while it would be easy to knock the latter given the reputation of the former, I think they're both good in different ways.
What was brilliant about the novel (to me) was that it was about our inability to understand of communicate with the alien intellegence, while at the same time, we are unable to understand and communicate with others of our own species. The two threads mirror each other, and almost completely removing one, leaves it a less interesting story. The Tarkovsy version doesn't do a great job of this either, but Solaris plays a bigger role, so you at least get an inkling of the ocean mirroring our own inadaquacies.
Then again I'm old enough to perhaps be more used to the pace of it.
I'd rather watch a glacier.
For comparison, Ebert's 2002 review of the remake [1].
But be sure that you read the new English ebook translation by Bill Johnston! The old Kilmartin/Cox translation was a retranslation from a French translation, and it's not good.
Other stories that I really liked because I had not thought about those ideas before are: Diaspora (Greg Egan), Permutation City (Greg Egan), Dark Universe (daniel galouye), Three Body Problem series (Cixin Liu)
He has also written other great but much more unusual books, such as Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (a Kafkaesque story set inside an underground Pentagon which was cut off from the rest of the world) or A Perfect Vacuum (a collection of reviews of books which do not exist.)
This movie has stuck with me for decades. I still refer to it when we get the "Star Trek" irrational exuberance crowd around spending multi-billions on space adventures. Secondly how about those small sats eh? Maybe not every space mission has to be decades long with budgets that match.
https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-part-o...
I ran a poll once for the movie people most wanted to see. The leaders were Solaris and The Big Lebowski. It was very close, but I, um, "encouraged" some people on the fence to vote Solaris.
Accusations of "election fraud" are misplaced! This is called "getting out the vote."
Looks like a review written by a 10 year old.
Then again the intended audience is the average movie goer, so the level of analysis is adequate.
Ebert certainly had a serious film critic side but he was mostly pretty mid-brow.
2003 review had more depth, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35429240