Solaris

Rating:
Summary: Greatest Russian film of all time!
Review: The Criterion Collection edition is being released exactly 1 day before Soderbergh's remake is coming out in theaters. I can't wait!!

I don't expect the remake to be better than the original classic.

This movie is incredible you should also read the book be Stanislaw Lem. It is a phenomenon.

This movie will blow your mind. It is a great psychological thriller.

Rating:
Summary: An Absolutely Brilliant Work Of Science Fiction
Review: When people mention 2001: A Space Odyssey in conversation, they should also mention Solaris because it is a classic from the same era. The story goes that the great filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky was not too happy with 2001 and decided to make his own grand science fiction film that was more human natured. Solaris is a planet with a huge, possibly sentient, ocean that causes humans to hallucinate things from their past and confront their fears. Kris Kelvin is a psychologist and astronaut who is sent to the station on Solaris to find out what happened to the scientists there since they lost contact. To say any more of the story would spoil it, and people should see this without knowing much about the story. One thing though, don't go into this expecting great special effects, lighting, music, etc. This is very much a subtle film with little flashiness, and it shows. This movie doesn't need special effects, it is very much a character-driven movie. As for the recent remake, I liked it, but I still prefer the Soviet version since it has more haunting atmosphere and takes its time to tell the story. Whichever adaptation you like though, try to read the book as it is one of the most thought-provoking stories ever told.

The new Criterion DVD of Solaris is everything we could have hoped for from a great company like Criterion. The picture has been newly remastered and looks really good for a foreign movie from 1972. There are some scenes where the grain is noticeable, but overall I can't get over how incredible this picture is. The sound is in single-channel mono which certainly won't impress people since it won't fill your room like a 5.1 mix would. You get used to it though. There is a commentary track with Tarkovsky analysts which is pretty interesting. They really help you appreciate the conditions this film was made under and the personal struggles of Tarkovsky. The second disc has a number of interviews as well as a bunch of extended scenes that were cut. The asking price on this 2-disc edition is high, but well worth it considering we're talking about a movie here that is often compared with 2001. Experience this classic for yourself and ponder what makes us human.

Rating:
Summary: like a diamond
Review: The Solaris movie has become a cult phenomenon, and it is interesting to think why. After all, the movie is long, slow, and difficult. Stanislaw Lem, who wrote the book, detested the movie. Even its director, Andrei Tarkovsky, later said that this was his worse work. It was produced in Stalinist Soviet Union, with committees overlooking the artistic process, so we can only imagine what Tarkovsky had to go through.

Even so, many people, myself included, consider this to be one of the best movies ever. I think the reason is that Solaris is so spacious and multi-layered that many people can find something very special in it. A key phrase in the movie is that we search the cosmos in order to find mirrors to observe ourselves; maybe Solaris is so successful because it works like a mirror too.

The movie, like the book, is superficially about the problem of communicating with an alien intelligence. The idea is that when confronted with an alien intelligence we may not be able do connect for lack of a common frame of reference. Contact, the other great book and also great movie, is about the same problem. Lem's ideas seem to go deeper than Sagan's though. Intelligence may not be something present in our brains, but rather it may be present only within our cultural environment, in our way to communicate with each other. People are not born intelligent, they learn intelligence through their interaction with society while growing up. So, in this science fiction story, when confronted by an ocean planet that appears to be sentient and intelligent, humankind finds itself powerless to communicate because of the lack of a common language. In Contact mathematics is posited as the ultimate language of communication between intelligent beings. In Lem's story, I think, feelings and their expression are posited as the ultimate language.

Lem is a marvelously fecund science fiction writer in the best tradition of exploring philosophical questions through the genre. The movie is simpler but also darker and more emotional in tone than the book. It touches such questions as the limits of knowledge, the paradox of consciousness, what it is to be human, and the meaning of love. It is an unforgettable movie you will enjoy thinking about, and will probably want to watch again several times in your life, even if years apart.

Technically the movie is OK. It does not succeed, and probably does not even try, to transport you into a technologically more advanced future, as the Odyssey 2001 did (a movie Tarkovsky saw before making Solaris). The visual effects are adequate at best. Photography though is splendid. Acting is good. I really liked the soulful performance of Natalya Bondarchuk as Hari. She brings amazing beauty and poise to her role, and if she appears wooden at first it is important to note that she is supposed to be an artificial construct that only slowly becomes human. Anyway I was blown away by her. Not everybody will like this movie, especially not people accustomed to Hollywood's fast and easy fare. Still I most highly recommend you take the risk and watch it, preferably more than once.

...

Rating:
Summary: The Emperor Has No Clothes
Review: To those who believe this movie is great: It is NOT.

To those who think this movie is too long: It is not; it only seems like it.

I fell asleep four times while trying to watch it (while reading subtitles). I would wakeup, rewind to the point where I fell asleep and continue trying to watch it, and try to stay awake.

I was expecting a long movie; but, I version I watched was only 2 1/2 hours long. So, I thought may I got an edited version that had critical scenes cut out. But, I now understand that I got the complete movie. Maybe, I just got a bad translation?

Rating:
Summary: A space capsule for some; a sleeping capsule for others
Review: Your reaction to this largely unknown 1969 Russian sci-fi opus depends on your attention span. If you are the reflective, analytical type, "Solaris" will give you plenty of things to ponder (and more than enough time to do so). If you are fidgety, easily distracted- you'd best stay away (you've probably already clicked out of this review anyway.) A psychologist/cosmonaut makes a "house call" on a space station hovering over an "ocean" (or entity?) that is somehow able to take metaphysical liberties with the inhabitant's perceptions of reality. Nearly 3 hours of leisurely paced conundrums ensue whilst we are presented with various What Does It All Mean entreaties. Is the age-old question answered? Again, it depends on who's watching. The philosophical open-endedness is really the only similarity to Kubrick's "2001", don't be misled by the knee-jerk comparisons. In fact, there is very little visual sense of the story taking place in "space". A more accurate comparison would be 1999's "Contact", which also leaves the viewer pondering whether the protaganist has journeyed into "outer" or "inner" space.

Rating:
Summary: Not on my list of classics
Review: I hesitated to add a review of 'Solaris' here because most of the other reviews are so glowing. Indeed, they border on reverent. I thought perhaps I just wasn't in the proper frame of mind when I watched it. So, I watched it again. No, that's not true. I watched the first thirty minutes again and gave up.Here are my thoughts, for what they're worth.

The movie is long [2 hr., 45 min.], but not as long as some other movies whose length seems justified. It's not just a matter of shots being held much longer than average. I've often enjoyed movies that use that technique. It's all the other shots that seem to be there because the director was too in love with them to edit them out. All good directors face the challenge of having to cut favorite scenes because they interfere with a movie's pacing. [This is an entirely different issue from a studio's insisting on cuts because it wants more showings per day or because it thinks twelve-year olds in Des Moines will get restless.} Timing is an essential part of the art of filmmaking, and I find that the excesses of 'Solaris' make parts of it woefully out of synch.

I am aware that this is a state-sponsored [Soviet Union] film rather than commercial venture. I understand the budget limitations that must have been in place. This is part, but not all, of the reason the movie feels so dated. It seems as if very little effort was taken to give much of a futuristic feel to is. [Compare it, for example, to 'Forbidden Planet' made fifteen years earlier. Today, even though many of its images are dated, you still know it takes place in some distant future.]

I know my opinions will be of no value to those who admire 'Solaris'; however, there are some readers who might appreciate these observations simply because they offer a different set of insights, earthbound as they may be.

Rating:
Summary: Beware of Outer Space Longeurs...
Review: First of all- re DVD quality-- it was a good idea to have both dubbed and subtitled versions both on the same disc, but it may not work very well with some older DVD players- it didn't with mine, but ran fine in either mode on a friend's player-- I'd advise you check your your manual re compatibility...

I know that the novelist, Stanislaw Lem, has a good reputation, and the original novel he wrote was already highly regarded before Tarkovsky got his mitts on it, so I suppose it may be worth checking out, as well as some of Tarkovsky's other pictures.
But, the film of **Solaris** itself-- well, that another story. Yes, some sequences are visually arresting, but a film is not a series of cool-looking still photos in some worshipful monograph, or at least, it's not supposed to be.
I know about Tarkovsky's rep as a highly esteemed art house directing guy, but this picture is mind-numbingly tedious. The inadvertent message of this film seems to be: don't be too sure you want to venture out into space, 'cause if the angry protoplasmic sea doesn't getcha, the boredom surely will.

Rating:
Summary: As endless as space itself.
Review: In recreating a dystopia in which reason, science and progress have irretrievably broken down, Tarkvosky resorts to his patented brand of mystical fuzziness. The primary site of breakdown is the exploratory spaceship docked outside the planet Solaris, its 85-man crew reduced to a mentally fragile two, the ship itself in ruins, wires and fuses sparking, doors smashed, the odour of decay and stagnation heavy (Tarkovsky once worked in Siberia, which this icy outpost, provoking memories and images of snow, irresistably recalls). As if to hammer home the point, this community, millions of miles away from earth, is a refuse heap of Western civilisation, fragments of a culture that collapsed under the anxiety of influence, a dumping ground for Aristotle, Breughel, Cervantes, Bach, religion, science, the whole show. The spaceship is the post-modern trashcan Angela Carter dreamed of, from which old assumptions could be overthrown, new stories could be written, distorted but liberating and subversive. The prospect fills Tarkovsky with horror.

In a film almost parodically larded with doubles, reflections, replicas, resurrections, parents and children, traditions and 'bookkeepers', the spaceship's mirror image is the Russian dacha in which the film opens, the domestic prelude to Solaris' fugue. We follow the psychologist Kris Kelvin taking a walk in the grounds on his last day before he is taken to the space station to assess the viability of continuing the programme. Focusing long on images of nature - fields, tarn, horse etc. - and family, the viewer might be tempted to view this as a repository of authenticity against which to measure the artifice of the space ship, even if Kris seems estranged from his surroundings, staring at the unfathomable waters and the flowing, but imprisoned reeds, a level of consciousnees unaccessible by the psychologist. Fog ominously wreathes the grounds' border. But, the house, we learn, is an imitation of his great-grandfather's - the natural is itself pastiche. Later, when Burton, the disgraced scientist whose sightings on board the spaceship (where memories are said to take physical form) were dismissed as hallucinations, shows Kelvin a film of the enquiry, the prespectives of viewing multiply like a Chinese Box, as we watch a trio of people watching a film which centres on one of them as a younger man, in a group who watch another film consisting of camera footage taking by Burton. The house in which they watch this video is itself filled with cultural artefacts, including prints of earlier modes of air-travel, such as hot-air balloons. The film's themes, therefore, are all stated in this first quarter, which concludes with its most brilliantly sustained sequence, a monochrome car journey down a motorway into an unnamed city which, merging into time-lapse, becomes as anonymous and liquid as the Ocean subsuming Solaris.

The rest of the film takes place on the space station, outside a planet ironically named after the sun, and which effectively shuts down enlightenment. Just as time and history loop in an infinite present, from which the only escape seems to be suicide, so Kris is visited by his dead wife, whose replication soon replaces the 'real' woman from whom he had been long alienated. The narrative then collapses into the usual confusions over the status of dreams, reality, projections, hallucinations etc., shifting between monochrome and colour, perhaps visualising the breaking borders and distinctions the scientists experience in this new world.

Tarkovsky's films are often seen as forbiddingly heavyweight, but a movie like 'Solaris' (deliberately?) creates a vacuum of ideas, so the viewer is free to undergo an intense visual experience. There is nothing here about Time, Memory, Reproduction, Dreams etd., you won't find more cogently examined in the films of Godard, Marker, Bunuel or Hitchcock. The film isn't much of a visual spectacle either - the wide camera always remains firmly centred on its characters, usually the protagonist, turning the sci-fi setting into an intense chamber drama (Tarkovsky's hero was Bergman, many of whose works are alluded to here). It is by submitting to the editing and visual patterning that the film's pleasure lies, locking the viewer into an absorbing, but mindless, spiral.

Rating:
Summary: Not the best of Tarkovsky¿s films but¿
Review: Don't compare this film to 2001 Space Odyssey-the two films are completely different in their presentation and content. Calling Solaris: "The Russian Space Odyssey," is nothing more but a sad marketing ploy of the distributors.

Tarkovsky made films about people-not about pieces of metal floating in space masqueraded as the future. Solaris is a film about people, and as such it has few of the cheap gimmicks usually present in sci-fi films. If you are patient, can appreciate subtlety, and found the actors dressed as apes at the beginning of 2001 laughable, you will find Solaris very rewarding-otherwise, don't waste your time.

I might also add that although I find Solaris amongst the best films ever made, I also think that it is one of the least convincing of those directed by Tarkovsky. Rather than watching Solaris, go see Andrei Rublev, or The Mirror, they are all conceptually similar, however, the latter two are much better realized.

Rating:
Summary: Since, I speak Solaris!
Review: I'm Russian. Maybe, that is why I liked that movie. Many critics comlaining that they could not understand the movie. "English subtitles are changing very quick, and all movie based on dialogue", they wrote. Ironically, when I was showing "Solaris" on VHS to my parents, even they understanding Russian dialogue didn't understand the plot of the movie! So, I was explaining to them every scene(actually, I was making up some explonations). I wish this movie could be dubbed in English someday, so more American sci-fi fans whould enjoy this truly classic original from Russian science-fiction movie collection. In Russia we didn't have a lot of sci-fi movies, but if Russian filmakers made one, it always was very deep in meaning. To this day I love this movie, because I still do not understand some of the "mystical" parts. That's the fun of sci-fi flicks. You're wery open minded about it, but still searching for truth! "Solaris" is a good example of it. There is no fancy special effects, because in late 70's Soviet cinema was slow comparing to Hollywood. Also this movie filmed in color & b/w (actially this is one of the movies which is the first one that introduced that wonderful "mood" technique). What made this movie special is creativity of director, Andrei Tarkovsky. The movie was edited very geniously!!! Maybe director didn't have enough budget for sertain scenes, but with his imagination every scene of the movie have a double meaning, or even three meanings. So, the viewer think that every scene meant to be like in the script. Maybe it's just the way movie was filmed to make you think that way. See! You never know! Typing about this movie, give me chills... I still remember that shocking scene close to the end... if you still didn't see that movie, I don't want to ruin it for you. Not the last scene, because the last scene it's just a homework for the viewer to think! The one scene before two last scenes. Where several surving characters have on the clothes "red" stains. Which is a hint for the viewer... The secret to understand the movie, you have to look very close to the details: in the background, the scene was filmed in color or in b/w, what are the characters wearing (in every scene), etc.) You prabably thinking, if you will pay attention to these details, how would you have a chance to read subtitles?! This movie was not meant to be with subtitles, instead it meant to be dubbed! My recommendation for you is to watch "Solaris" two times or three. First one read all the subtitles, second time watch for "all" details even very un-important ones, and three watch it again - only this time think of every scene in the 'different sense' of meaning?! Treaky? If you want to find out more about this movie, or all it "visual answers/hints" from director for the viewer and you have a hard time to find them. ....