Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant and Daring
Review: I had seen the Russian version of this film six months ago. I thought that was a pretty limp film; it certainly didn't live up to the hype it has received on amazon. Ponderous and enigmatic, the film seemed lost in its own cleverness.So I was intrigued by the new Soderberg version. I put it on, knowing something of the story from the Russian film. I was mezmerized. This movie - which Soderberg has wanted to direct his whole life - is one of the most daring and cerebral pieces of cinema ever to come out of Hollywood. It doesn't surprise me that many people don't get it, given the fact they have been numbed by typical movie fare. The writing is spare - you are given just enough to pull you through. You are never told exactly what's going on - you have to figure it out for yourself. But there are plently of clues, if you look for them. These clues are not in the dialog (though you could find some there). They are in the photography, set design, acting, score, and especially the editing. The structure and editing of this film is very unconventional. Soderberg mixes the past, present, and future in a poetic fashion - the story is not so much about Cloony's character, nor is it about the "planet". It's about how every point in our lives touches every other point, past, present, and future. There were moments when the hair on the back of my neck stood on end, mostly due to Soderberg's brilliant and daring filmmaking. The only other film to evoke this kind of a response in me is 2001. Bravo!
Rating: 
Summary: disappointing
Review: A film by Steven Soderberg After watching Out of Sight, Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and Ocean's Eleven, I decided that I liked Steven Soderberg. I'm willing to give him a chance on the less commercial films like The Limey, Solaris, or Full Frontal. While the trailer suggested that this movie was pretty much just George Clooney in space and something about a dead wife, I trusted the Steven Soderberg name and rented the movie. That was a mistake. I like science fiction, and I don't require massive explosions or special effects. I expected Solaris to be a slow moving science fiction film, I just didn't expect it to be quite this dull and boring. The premise of the movie is that there is a space station near the planet Solaris doing research on the planet to see if there is any commercial benefit to Earth. However, there has been no communication with that space station and Chris Kelvin (George Clooney), a psychiatrist, is sent to convince the crew to return. He finds some dead bodies as well as two freaked out crew members. During the nighttime, Chris wakes up to find his dead wife Rheya (Natascha McElhone) in his cabin. The movie deals with Chris still attached to his wife and Rheya trying to remember/figure out if she is, in fact, the real Rheya. This is a slow moving movie, and I must emphasize how slow the movie is paced. The plot did not reveal anything about the planet Solaris or the import of what was happening, so I wasn't able to sustain interest in what was going on. I didn't see that Soderberg was hinting at something larger, but rather that the movie was empty of an actual story that made any sort of sense. Okay, so Solaris (the planet) is somehow affecting things and creating the deepest desires (??) of the crew, but is it? How? For what purpose? All things that I would expect would be explored to actually tell the story were ignored. Even expecting a slow paced film, I was let down. Steven Soderberg is a talented director, and there were individual shots that I liked, but I cannot recommend this movie to anyone.
Rating: 
Summary: Solaris
Review: In a recent interview, Stanislaw Lem said he was disappointed that Soderbergh's update brought the love story to the forefront. Agreed, but the movie clocks in at half the length of Tarkovsky's, so naturally many of the philosophical threads can't be addressed. Lem, like many other writers in similar situations, needs to stop thinking of his novel as the sacred scripture from which the adapting artist should not deviate. He should understand that hacking a text to pieces, selling it for spare parts, junking what doesn't fit, reassembling it--this is high praise. Soderbergh does a great job with the story, and with the camera (as usual, though he was coming off of "Full Frontal" which has my vote for the worst movie of the last 10 or 15 years), and the performances are all fantastic as well. I don't believe there is as much sacrificed in this 90-minute version as Lem would have us believe. It's still a deeply thought-provoking story.
Rating:
Summary: The first sci-fi film about IDEAS since Blade Runner
Review: Apparently, some people seem to find the SOLARIS viewing experience far more oblique, far more opaque than I did. Personally, I thought the film was fairly clear in its message, even before I listened to the James Cameron/Steven Soderbergh commentary (which, by the way, only hints at the answers; likewise, they never come right out and say, in so many words, that they always intended for us, the audience, to figure out our own answers). *-*-* POSSIBLE SPOILERS *-*-* *-*-* POSSIBLE SPOILERS *-*-* My interpretation of the film stems directly from the flashback sequence in which we see Chris and Rheya at a dinner party with his friends; Rheya lays it all out on one sentence when she asks what would happen to us if we ever encountered a being so powerful as to be indistinguishable from God. Solaris actually is that "possible" God-being, albeit a gravely defective one. Despite the fact that Solaris can form substance from nothingness -- which, in theology, is a power attributed only to God, and therefore eliminates Solaris as an incarnation of evil (since Satan and his minions can only destroy, not create) -- the problem with Solaris is that it creates without any apparent foreknowledge of, or even the slightest awareness of, the consequences of its actions. In other words, it creates without purpose, it creates because it can which, in my mind, is why Solaris is not the one "true" God but, rather, simply a being so powerful as to indistinguishable from a god to us. While a part of me believes that we are supposed to assume that the Solaris is God, in that it can forgive sins, create beings with free will and gift those whom accept its blessings with eternal life, eternal joy, the fact that Soderbergh -- intentionally, or unintentionally -- presented Solaris to us as a being that creates without foreknowledge or purpose is what prevents me from making that final "leap of faith."
Rating: 
Summary: Am I Alive?
Review: Solaris is a moderately satisfying Science Fiction story in the vain of M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense. The plot is predictable and moves ever so slowly to its foregone conclusion. The special effects and attention to artistic detail within the Space station are commendable and worth a view if you're a fan of the Space genre.
Rating:
Summary: Pretty to look at, but no brain
Review: There are spoilers in this review. This is kindof necessary, I'm afraid, as many of this movie's flaws are there. If for some reason you want to see it, don't read this. I feel very strongly about Solyaris, Tarkovsky's version made in 1972. I consider it as the best movie I've ever seen. But I went into Solaris with an open mind. Unfortunately, Solaris is definitively an inferior and dumbed-down remake of Solyaris, despite claims to the contrary. The first half of Solaris is basically a fast-forward reworking of the first half of Solyaris. The second half is basically a composite of flashbacks and the new, grating plot that comes to the fore. There are things that work but they are not part of any coherent context. For example, the relationship between Kelvin and Rheya (Hari in the original) is much more fleshed out. These scenes are real winners, but only highlight one of the main problems of this remake : it is trying to force a love story where none is possible. The whole plot of Kelvin and Rheya/Hari is predicated on the premise that Kelvin does *not* love her, or at least that their relationship is doomed. Otherwise, there would be no point in having Solaris invoke her as a source of guilt for Kelvin in the first place ! That Kelvin and Rheya have such a great relationship, only marred by one clash (due to Rheya's extreme stupidity - I will mention this later), only makes the premise even less likely. The scene with a dream of Gibarian has perhaps the best original dialogue, but is nonsensical and relates to absolutely nothing. There are nice special effects of the station, the docking sequence, and Solaris itself. While I still think the original Solaris visual is better, the docking sequence is very good, and one thing the original lacked. But once again, they amount to very little and relate to very little. The blatant racism. Oh dear. I'm sure that organo-centric people will disagree with me, but I consider this version extremely racist and offensive. I know that in Solyaris, Sartorius is also racist, in that he considers the Solaristic constructs as beings to be studied and nothing more. But at least he has a reason : he considers the Solaristic constructs as objects of scientific study, and to do so has decided to ignore their sentience. Gordon (Sartorius' replacement in this version), on the other hand, has no such motive. She is Pure Evil (tm), the kind of foaming-at-the-mouth racist you only see in movies, and only desires to affirm the superiority of man over the "inferior" constructs (indeed, she says as much, which is very disturbing) and leave the station. But she is also a black woman, so I suppose all this must be forgotten. After all, minorities cannot be racist nazis. Right ? Well, never mind. Even the director and producer are openly racist. As James Cameron says in the commentary, "when a girl is cute, whether she's made of subatomic particles or whatever, we still want to **** her", and that the acceptance of the woman by Kelvin is "a male thing". In the surprise ending, where we learn Snow is also a Solaristic construct, the two others look at him in disgust, and desire to kill him. There is also the whole thing about Rheya/Hari. In Solyaris, we are not *told* that Hari is intelligent, we *see* it, and we also see her humanization process. "Show, not tell". Rheya in Solaris is *told* to us to be intelligent, but we don't *see* it, and she does not evolve at all. In fact, she is shown to be rather stupid in all instances. She is shown as a theist arguing against evolution, a pregnant woman who gets an abortion because her husband is an atheist (thru the kind of twisted and simplistic reasoning that only a fundamentalist Christian would invoke), and as a floozy who is barely aware of her own existence, basically worshipping the memories she was created from. The ending is atrocious, creating gratuitous tension instead of exploring Snow's character, losing all surprise and gaining not only a standard Hollywood good ending but also a blatant religious symbolism. At the end, Snow announces that the weapon they have used to destroy the constructs has spent all the station's power, and that Solaris is expanding exponentially. This creates tension as Kelvin and Gordon escape, but the former changes his mind. So we know where he will end up. No suspense. And the end that seems to equate Solaris with God is, I'm afraid, completely confirmed by the director, in the commentary. Ironically, a story which is partly about how humans try futilely to reduce everything to themselves, spawned a movie which reduces the unknown to human myths. Solaris keeps a relatively slow pacing (compared to Hollywood fare), but it has no brain. It tries to make Lem's story into a love story, when that is a contradiction. Lem's story is the antithesis of a love story. Adding the ideological stupidity of the movie, these are really, really bad cards that even Clooney's great acting, Jeremy Davies' highly enjoyable acting, and the great visuals cannot help. Sure, it's superior to standard Hollywood fare, and has a number of great scenes, but this is a total intellectual dead end. Kelvin : "What does Solaris want from us ?"
Gibarian : "Why do you think it has to want something ?"
Rating:
Summary: Scientific interpretation
Review: SPOILER ALERT I thoroughly enjoyed this movie! To me, this was not about love or death, rather it hinted at the posssibilites of future technology and provided just one example of its consequences. The idea that humans being replicated is not absurd, and its not based on magic or miracles. Whilst cloning is replication through genetic engineering another technology that has recently been in the spotlight is Nanotechnology. As I understand it, nanotechnology is the chemical process of putting atoms side by side to create any object that is desired. Everything that exists is made up of various atoms arranged in unique shapes and structures. With nanotechnology we could change coal to diamond by simply altering the chemcial structure couldnt we? In time, we could replicate anything and anyone. Sub-atomic self replicating robots putting together atoms to create or repair anything that we desire. So is that what Solaris is. An alien life form with the ability of nanotechnology. Maybe the alien life form is those tiny sub atomic robots. The second concept that the movie plays with is memory. You would be surprised how inaccurate our memory is. How 12 years ago I remember my mate wearing an orange T-shirt to my party but in fact it was red. Our retrieval of information from our memory bank is not perfect. And so Clooney's wife was a product of what he remembered... a suicidal woman. And thats what she kept doing. It is in the end when he realises how wrong his memory had served him... that her suicide was a spontaneous and impulsive act after he had left her. And hence she returns not suicidal in the end. So in my eyes, those self replicating robots now reached earth ... and who knows what would happen from there. So.. what is life... just a bunch of atoms in a particular arrangement. Psychological, social and physical existence of a human are just all atoms arranged in a particlular order. (And if you played around with the arrangement you could convert someone into another known arrangement like gold, diamond or dirt.
Rating:
Summary: Intelligent, moving and philosophically challenging
Review: What if you would manage to reach the far edges of the galaxy, and you would not find a lifeless void, or strange cultures, or the perfect predator, or super fast spaceships with laser-guns and warp-drives, or even amiable life forms ready to nurse you into some higher state of consciousness? What if what you would find is a mirror to yourself: the tangible, incarnated moment of your life that was the most affecting of all? It could be anything from heartbreaking tragedy to regretted harmful intent: from your lost wife, to your son who is alive but out of your reach, to even yourself. What if you wake up and it lies right beside you in your bed, unaware of what it is and how it confronts you? What would you do, and how would you handle the confrontation? That is Solaris.
Solaris confronts you with the vanity of supposing you could handle the universe around you, when you cannot handle even yourself. That question is what makes me love this film and the original novel by Stanislaw Lem - though they are not interchangeable. And that is the foremost reason people do not love this film. Steven Soderbergh's movie takes this very philosophical theme and enhances it, while abandoning the scientific. I will give an example. In the novel, the surface of Solaris is covered by a weird, liquid substance, a little like water but it behaves. It acts as if it lives, but its purposes are utterly beyond comprehension, if there is a purpose at all. In the film, Solaris is a luminescent gas giant, and the crew never once settles down to discuss the scientific aspects of it. In the novel, chapters are dedicated to these matters. This is but one adaptation. Inevitably, it scares off the purists; but ask yourself: does an adaptation inevitably make for a bad film? I already said I love this film, but how can I - having cared for the novel as much as I do? Well, I care for the film's visual storytelling for instance, and the "Vangelisesque" soundtrack, and the sets, and the acting. But when I read the novel, the philosophical theme is above all the most impressive. The screenwriters have taken, added to, and deleted from Lem's original story, but they left this core question intact. Accurately: they have done more than that: they have amplified it. And I feel this question cannot be amplified enough. For these reasons, I give this film four stars. Bram Janssen,
The Netherlands
Rating:
Summary: A great science fiction psychological tale
Review: A Science fiction movie like it should be: catching, cerebral, intriguing, and opening up inumerous possibilities. Very respectful of the original Russian movie, and Stanislaw Lem's book. Great acting, great directing. The environments that are created are very compelling, realistic, and the perfectly minimalist soundtrack keeps you in the mood. I recommend watching the original and this remake in a row!
Rating:
Summary: If you're proud to be an American...
Review: ...you'll hate this movie. Why? Because they're in space and yet they still don't manage to find anything threatening to our national or worldwide security to blow up. I think the people that gave this film 1 star are probably confused because there wasn't much action and there were no explosions. Neither were there any psychotic evil nemeses nor slime-oozing big-headed alien species bent on the destruction of humankind.
However, these things are not what comprise a "good movie," unless you are unwilling to let your mind out of its cage for 90 minutes. This movie is a deliberately paced (read "slow" for you adrenaline junkies), moody, thought-provoking piece. It mostly accomplishes its goal of setting a mysterious tone and probing certain areas of the human psyche.
That being said, before you watch it make sure you're in the right mood and can devote your full attention. Not because it's difficult to follow, but because if you're distracted there are no explosions or highly dramatic scenes to draw you back in. It's a movie that does well if you're alone and in a contemplative mood. I couldn't decide on 3 or 4 stars, but went with 4 because it's at 3 right now and I think it deserves about 3.5.
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