Solaris
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List Price: $27.98
Features
• NTSC
In Theaters : 27 November, 2002
DVD Release : 29 July, 2003 |
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Solaris description
A curious mix of science fiction and metaphysical love story, Solaris centers around Chris Kelvin (George Clooney), a psychologist sent to investigate why a space station orbiting an alien planet has stopped communications. The planet has the power to delve into human psyches and re-create lost loved ones--in Kelvin's case, his dead wife (Natascha McElhone), whom he then wants to bring back to Earth. Director Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Erin Brockovich) fills almost every shot with faces and bodies, as if to emphasize the human soul rather than outer space as the movie's true subject. Unfortunately, the vagueness of the environment--combined with a script that implies more than it shows--serves to dislocate our ability to engage with the characters, rendering Solaris emotionally inert. Jeremy Davies, as a lingering crew member, brings a hint of humor to the otherwise serious-minded proceedings. --Bret Fetzer |
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
Soderbergh's underrated remake of Stanislaw Lem's classic science fiction masterpiece is provocative and beautiful
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A psychologist travels to a remote space station -- orbiting a unique planet called Solaris -- in order to investigate the strange behavior of its crew and offer recommendations as to the future of the operation. What he finds is a planet that works on your mind and memories in strange ways. In the original novel, the core theme explored through this story seemed to be the impossibility of purely rational detachment and objectivity. We cannot confront the phenomena of the cosmos without also coming to grips with ourselves and our own demons. In Tarkovsky's vision the voyage to outer space turns out to be a kind of metaphor for a certain kind of transcendence that turns out to be both false and impossible. Genuine transcendence, in Tarkovsky's view, is not about detachment and is not (as traditionally conceived) a freeing of the mind from the confines of the body and from the bondage of our emotional life -- but involves the transformation of body, earth and feeling through art. Soderbergh's version captures elements of both, but also reworks themes from his own work as early as "Sex, Lies and Videotape."
When James Cameron announced he was going to remake Tarkovsky's Solaris, based on the novel of the same name by Stanislaw Lem, I worried that he was going to turn it from a compelling meditation on our desire for transcendence into a B-horror sci-fi pic with high production values. That had already been done, I thought, and not all that badly, in "Event Horizon" (an obvious but uncredited loose adaptation where the demons from the characters' pasts generated by the planet -- in this case a black hole -- turn out to be literally that: demons from Hell). Luckily, Cameron decided to turn the project over to Stephen Soderbergh. I got interested again -- and Soderbergh delivered with a gorgeously filmed and very intriguing arthouse science fiction near-masterpiece. His film is not so much a remake of Tarkovsky's film as a reconsideration of the original novel, that is in some ways more faithful to the novel, but that at the same time takes up themes unique to Tarkovsky's vision and reworks them in ways that fit with Soderbergh's own obsessions: less with the possibility of spiritual transcendence and more with the difficulties of intimacy and trust and of the ways memories and guilt haunt the present.
George Clooney is perfect as Chris Kelvin, played here as a once-confident and cocky man haunted by loss. Although the film's box office suffered because the film was marketed as an action picture with a flashy George Clooney as star, and then audiences saw a brooding and contemplative film that was as far as possible from the flash of Ocean's Eleven, this is to my mind one of Clooney's best performances and certainly showed what he was capable of before films like Syriana and Michael Clayton. Though Jeremy Davies seems to be stuck in a certain kind of role, he was perfect for this one as a brilliant but neurotic and extremely paranoid scientist, an intriguing alternative to the role played by Anatoli Solonitsyn in Tarkovsky's version. What I think is most interesting about the film is the way that Soderbergh takes the basic idea and reworks it in ways that involve reconsiderations of the themes from films like Sex, Lies and Videotape and Schizopolis: the ways we create false masks for our lovers to hide our insecurities, that art can work as a kind of false memory, allowing us to reconstruct our past and achieve a false intimacy without risk. The basic science fiction conceit of Solaris is that the planet is able to replicate memories and especially those one would like to repress because they are unsettling and generate guilt, and bring them back to life, and the varying reactions to these replications suggest different ways of dealing with memories and images and of reconciling ourselves to the failures and guilt in the past. Soderbergh makes this a story of how one man is able to reconcile himself with his own guilt by collaborating in the creation of and then embracing a lie, a fiction, an artwork. |
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Solaris dvd movie.