Solaris

Rating:
Summary: This movie will flop . . .
Review: . . . but, given what American audiences are making box-office successes these days, that's a compliment. They certainly were eager to shell out $$$ for Soderbergh's most recent "commercial" films, like the you-go-girl feminist epic *Erin Brockovich*, the Drug-War-for-Dummies epic *Traffic*, and the pointless remake of *Ocean's Eleven*. (Well, okay, they stayed away from *Full Frontal*, proving that you can't fool ALL the people ALL of the time.) Got news for you, folks: those were the bad Soderbergh movies. His latest, *Solaris*, is a good Soderbergh movie, his best to date . . . and -- get this! -- it's better than Andrei Tarkovsky's original film of the same title. First of all, it's shorter. Point for Soderbergh. Second, there's a minimum of that philosophical blah-blah-blah that makes Tarkovsky's *Solaris* so intolerable at times during its 2 1/2-hour length. Another point for Soderbergh. I mean, don't get me wrong, Tarkovsky's picture is fine -- heck, I'd give it 3-stars just for trying so hard -- but if I feel like being awed by cosmic mystery, I'll just put in my copy of *2001* into my DVD player. (Better cinematography, and less blah-blah.) Indeed, Soderbergh's *Solaris* is remarkably free of dialogue altogether, which I personally found refreshing. The precise -- and, at times, lovely -- photography was equally refreshing, especially coming from this director, who tends to be herky-jerky with the camera, or otherwise pretentious with color (as in *Traffic*). I'm not going to talk much about the story, because any prior information ruins the movie for the viewer (other reviewers, please take note!). I'll just conclude with this: *Solaris* is one of the most challenging films from Hollywood I've seen this year. In fact, I can't even believe this was a major release, starring George Clooney, of all people. I laugh when I think about all those housewives out there going to see this because they were lured by promises of seeing several shots of Mr. Clooney's "butt". As that bully on *The Simpsons says, "Haw haw!" -- you just walked into an art film, Soccer-Mom! *Solaris* IS an art film, make no mistake about it (now I'm quoting Dubya -- I'm on a roll!), of the type they stopped making after the New Wave died down and the Movie Brats sold out. (The editing, which confuses past, present, and future, certainly recalls Resnais.) The movie doesn't get 5-stars for two reasons: first, it's a wee bit full of itself, and Soderbergh hasn't earned that right yet; second, it's got that irritating Jeremy Davies, who stutters and mumbles and waves his thin, pale hands around like palm fronds in a high wind. Beyond that, it's an excellent film that will, as I said, flop at the box-office only to develop a cult following once it's out on DVD. But really, there's no need to wait. See it now.

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: A fascinating journey into inner space.
Review: Every once in a while a film comes along that makes its audience think. Really think. Quite often these films are poorly received at the time of their release, defying as they do the conventional desire for easily read entertainment. Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is one such film, loved by some and loathed by others. Steven Soderbergh's SOLARIS is another. Any group of viewers is likely to emerge from SOLARIS polarized which, given the subject matter of the film, is not necessarily a bad thing.

SOLARIS' story is simple, but its implications are maddeningly complex. At some point in the future, a group of scientists studying a distant planet (the eponymous Solaris) have begun to experience a phenomenon they cannot explain, but which jeopardizes both their collective sanity and their mission. Psychiatrist Chris Kelvin, played with great depth and subtlety by George Clooney, is dispatched in an attempt to salvage the Solaris expedition. Once there, however, Kelvin is snared in the same mystery that has trapped the Solaris scientists.

For a big-budgeted SF film, SOLARIS is incredibly intimate. The cast is small, with no more than four actors onscreen at any given time, and consequently the camera is allowed to rest on individual performers for much longer than in other films in the genre. The three primary figures - Clooney as Dr. Kelvin, along with Viola Davis and Jeremy Davies as scientists on the Solaris expedition - are complex characters afflicted with doubts and other personal demons. The troubling intensity of the Solaris experience has already driven one scientist to suicide, and resulted in murder. Soderbergh, who adapted author Slanislaw Lem's classic novel for the screen and served as his own director of photography, understands that to take the situation on Solaris seriously, the audience has to come as close as possible to the experience of those living in it.

SOLARIS raises difficult questions. How well do we know the people we love? How could we choose between reality and perfectly realized fantasy? Is there any way to truly understand the nature of God? Is there God at all? These kinds of uncertainties are enough to drive many audiences into a frenzy. It doesn't help that SOLARIS offers no explicit answers to any of these queries.

Not that SOLARIS could. As the film suggests (but never states unequivocally), everyone has his or her own experience of life's essential moments, and it is up to every individual to forge an understanding of his or her existence. SOLARIS is challenging material, perhaps even more challenging than that most opaque of SF films, 2001. Unlike most films, which are designed to be as disposable as a paper cup, SOLARIS demands to be considered, and then reconsidered. It will stay with the viewer long after the final frame has run.

But is SOLARIS any good? For those who want nothing more of their filmic experience than entertainment, the SOLARIS will be an irritant. For those who welcome the idea of film as a starting point for intellectual consideration, SOLARIS is a remarkable achievement. Technically and aesthetically, SOLARIS is a perfectly realized film rich with powerful emotional content, haunting images, and moving sounds. It's a film that deserves to be seen, and pored over, for years.

Rating:
Summary: Hard to DISlike this film
Review: First for the caveats to this review: I haven't read Lem's story, I haven't seen the original Russian film of it, and I haven't read the 264 other reviews currently shown here (though I might work through some of them later), I won't begin to try to summarize the plot, I'm not a particular fan of Lem or science fiction or of the director or any of the actors, and I'm writing this after having watched the film 3 times (very rare for me) over the past 6 months. So with that all out of the way...

I find this film to be excellent for several reasons: a moving and thought provoking story is probably the most obvious, but also excellent understated direction and straightforward, sincere acting are others. Good casting, too, I'd have to say -- you don't spend the movie thinking, oh, I'm watching (actor's name) playing (description of character). Good on-screen chemistry between Clooney and McElhone would be essential to this film, and that comes through, along with the director's interesting treatment of them. It helps that it's also definitely different from the vast majority of other sci-fi or non-sci-fi movies out there in its level of emotion. Part of that difference, and perhaps another reason for its quality, is its ambiguity. If there's one warning that should go out to those considering seeing it, it's that they shouldn't see it if they enjoy clearly defined outcomes.

The movie grapples courageously with LOSS, which is essentially what it's about, and you forget it's sci-fi almost throughout, except when the occasional unavoidable scene/line reminds you. But you're enveloped in a story about connections between people, how they relate to each other, the sometimes unavoidable selfishness of everyone in their perspectives on the world, and what that can cost. It has gotten richer to me through the subsequent viewings, perhaps because you see more or perhaps because you just have more time to sink into these themes.

I really cannot understand why people would DISlike this film (unless again they're just searching for something much more straightforward), but I think many would like it, even if they don't normally like science fiction in general, because of the degree of emotion and though and humanity in the story.

Rating:
Summary: Clooney gives one of his best...Solaris is a great movie
Review: George Clooney (Oceans 11 and 12, From Dusk Till Dawn) brings you into the life of Chris Kelvin who ventures up to a space station called Solaris where he finds that there are only two people left on the ship and the rest of the crew has vanished, so he interrogates the 2 to find out what happened and also in the process he starts to see his dead wife, Natascha McElhone (Laurel Canyon, Truman Show) and then he finds out the real truth of what happened on that ship. A powerfully hypnotic and tense movie with Clooney at the top of his game giving one of his best performances and McElhone has never been more beautiful. Also starring Jeremy Davies (Spanking The Monkey, Going All The Way) and Viola Davis. Directed by Steven Soderbergh and produced by James Cameron.

Rating:
Summary: Completely BORING
Review: I love all types of movies but, let's call this like we see it ok?
This has GOT to be one of the most boring movies I have ever seen in my life.
It seems as though the director was trying to copy a Stanley Kubrick style film and most assuredly DID NOT accomplish this.
The story made no sense and had no resolution! TERRIBLE.
Buy this if you have trouble going to sleep at night because believe me, it will put you RIGHT OUT.

Rating:
Summary: This is not my Beautiful Wife...
Review: Just like the old Talking Heads song, psychologist Chris Kelvin wakes up in his spartan sleeping chamber aboard a space station orbiting the enigmatic planet Solaris to discover his wife Rheya by his side. His beautiful wife, awake, close to his side, easing him out of one nightmare and into another.

There's one minor complication: Rheya has been dead for years.

So there you have it: Kelvin, stunned, having a David Byrne-esque "Once in a Lifetime" moment, wondering "is this my beautiful wife"? And for much of Steven Soderbergh's heartbreaking, masterful, quiet and searing "Solaris", the supposition is that maybe that doesn't matter very much.

"Solaris" is not Soderbergh's finest hour---for that look to "Kafka". But that said, it is a quiet masterpiece, a brave film that operates solely on its own terms and offers the viewer absolutely no quarter nor compromise. Surrender yourself and your time to the film's immediacy, just as the survivors on the film's spartan space station give themselves over to the unknowable forces on the planet, and you will probably be as moved as I was.

Based on Stanislaw Lem's novel and reprising the material in Andrei Tarkovsky's epic Russian film, Soderbergh's "Solaris" is only incidentally science fiction. It's more a thin skein of science fiction stretched taut across a dense, luminous surface of human pain, of the anguish and fallibility of memory, of love, of love lost, of the possibility of redemption. That's really what Soderberg wants to cut down into, and he wields a brutally sharp scalpel here.

Have you lost the thing you loved most in your life? Have you lost true love? Fine: what would you do if you thought you could reclaim it, salvage the moment you lost it, make things right again?

What would that be worth to you?

What would you do to get it?

That, in essence, is "Solaris". Oh yes, to be sure, the plot is about a space station orbiting the mysterious planet Solaris; the station's corporate owners have lost contact with it, and a rescue team is equally silent. The DBA Corporation turns to Clooney's Chris Kelvin (bravely and masterfully played by George Clooney, who owns this film), a psychologist who was a colleague of the station's chief scientist Gibarian, who had sent across a mysterious invitation to Kelvin before the first security team had been dispatched. He arrives to a scene of unnervingly, creepily quiet chaos, with Gibarian dead and the rest of the crew having retreated to their separate quarters, plagued by what they contend are visions.

Much like Polanski's "The Ninth Gate", "Solaris" suffered from a marketing campaign that perhaps emphasized too much the science fiction elements of the piece. The space station, the planet, the sere, technical, sleek surfaces of the examination rooms and sleeping quarters are merely palletes on which Clooney paints his own internal torment and very private suffering, writ large; the space setting is, like Holocaust-era Warsaw in "The Pianist", almost incidental to the movie. This film could have been set anywhere---underground, in the desert, in a skyscraper penthouse.

Soderbergh directs deftly, fluidly, using his technically precise sets as counterpoints to the choices the crew of the space station must make. The acting here is top-notch: Clooney turns in a laser-perfect performance, Natasha McElhone is remarkably poised and completely convincing, Jeremy Davies provides a few wan laughs as the unnerved Snow, and Viola Davis fights the good fight as Gordon, who absolutely, positively will not let the Human Race be undone by good intentions. And here, by the way, is just one of trillions of deft little touches Soderbergh uses, this one hinting of alien invasion: what better way for some vast intelligence to undermine humanity than by burrowing at us through our emotions?

For all the breathtaking expansiveness of the shots, which draw favorable comparison with Kubrick's work in 2001, this is an interior movie, and the film lives or dies on the chemistry and work between Clooney and McElhone. For my money, they are remarkable together. Each scene between them, each line, each breath, each facial contortion, tells; there is not a wasted sequence or shot here, and technically this may very well be Soderbergh's most compact, complete, and least pretentious film.

Tragedy, horror story, dark night of the soul, fable of a love lost---whatever it is, "Solaris" is unforgettable.

Rating:
Summary: A BOY A GIRL AND A PLANET
Review: Natascha McElhone may be a fine actress but her 'who am I, where am I?' portrayal of a deceased woman materializing in outer space lacks much conviction of whatever the film is trying to convince us of. There are moments of intense drama here; George Clooney blankly staring at a torn jagged hole in the spaceship wall, but there is also a dreary unsensational flashback romance occupying most of the film that moves like a wedding march to a funeral drum and does little to build suspense or understanding. The movie intersperses to the image of pink neon gasses surrounding the planet Solaris constantly as if saying, to increasing annoyance, 'meanwhile back on the ranch". "Solaris" could have been intriguing if it had realized it's psychological and cinematic potential as alternative science-fiction. Come to think of it, haven't I seen all this before, albeit on a much smaller budget, in an episode of the original "Star Trek"?

Rating:
Summary: Your shrink would like Solaris, but it's not for normal folk
Review: On the up side, good sets and costumes. Lame special effects combo with a plot so crippled that it's wheelchair needs crutches. George Clooney, bless his handsome heart, is unable to rescue this total waste of mind with his limited acting range, although you can see him painfully trying. Unless you are really into abnormal foresnic psychology then within 15 minutes of watching Solaris you will be asking yourself if you really want to sit through the rest of it. I did, and I did sit through the rest and it wasn't worth it. Buy another movie.

Rating:
Summary: Prolific, mature storytelling
Review: Soderbergh reaches to the very root of science fiction to tell a story that's essentially about what drives us all: desire.

Spolier alert: The subtext explores the human psyche as the protagonist emotionally evolves before our very eyes. Chris Kelvin, the title character who is brilliantly portrayed by George Clooney, has to reach beyond his training as a psychologist to understand a situation where the memory of his late wife Rheya (Natasha McElhone) comes back to life on Solaris.

A situation is thus created where Kelvin opts to disregard his training and instead embraces this alternate reality he finds himself within. It's Kelvin's struggle to believe the unbelievable that drives his character throughout the movie.

The twist is that Rheya gains an awareness that she's actually *not* alive, and in fact is existing only as a kind of simulacrum that is generated by Solaris. Her character eventually understands that living someone else's memory is no life at all, and her struggle is to accept the inevitable fact that she is not Rheya but just a living memory of Rheya as held by Kelvin.

This is an intelligent, precise, and masterfully edited film. My only disappointment is in the performance by Jeremy Davies who chooses to act with his hands rather than with his face. His character is actually quite critical to the plot and he delivers his dialogue quite convincingly, but his choices as an actor were a bit disappointing. Better to cast Henry Thomas from Gangs of New York in my opinion.

In any case the movie is very intellectual, subtly challenging, and I found it immensely satisfying to watch.