Solyaris (Tarkovsky, 1972)

[X.]

Solaris (1972)

"Solaris" is steeped in the torment and sadness of its characters.

Tarkovsky has eschewed his Russian counterpart Sergei Eisenstein's montage style in favour of a demanding, long-take aesthetic. His film's pacing is challenging and languid, as it should be, and the monologues on Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky imbues the themes with a high-brow, intellectual bent; this belies the popular notion of "Solaris" being Tarkovsky's most accessible film.

While Soderbergh took the tenants of Stanislaw Lem's book and made a leaner, more clear narrative for his 2002 remake - and both films are multilayered - Tarkovsky's version is a sprawling epic: complex and confusing in parts. While Soderbergh focussed singularly on the romance, the love and mourning between Clooney and McElhone's characters, Tarkovsky is far more interested in commenting on humanity and science in philosophical terms. The magical scene where Kris and Hari experience weightlessness may possibly be Tarkovsky's most obvious attack on Kubrick's clinical austerity in "2001" - it is one of several highpoints in a masterpiece. ak

Rating:
out of 

[madali]

I love the Clooney Solaris. Are they too similiar?

[X.]

Despite what James Cameron and Soderbergh have said publicly, Soderbergh's 2002 version, while drawing its basis from Stanislaw Lem book, is a remake of Tarkovsky's film which itself was a radical interpretation of the Lem book (Lem wasn't happy with Tarkovsky for injecting the screen adaptation with his own meditations on life, death, heaven, hell, God. He even labeled it “Crime and Punishment in space”).

Secondly, although I like both films, for me, Tarkovsky’s version is more ambitious and challenging (thematically and stylistically). Soderbergh's film takes the mysteries of the Tarkovsky film and spells it out for us. And wherever the elements are not in service to the love story, Soderbergh leaves out much of the spiritual and philosophical themes that formed the crux of the Tarkovsky film. Bottom line, if there were no Tarkovsky, we would have a very different Soderbergh film.

Pick your poison.

[ozzylogic]

I haven't watched the original, but the 2002 remake comes in my top 10 of all time, and i've watched it a gazillion times partly due to the haunting music. I heard the original is extra long, but I have to watch it to be sure.

[animatedude]

i've just watched the first 30 min of the Soderbergh version and it's as expected....a series of pretentious wanking,should i continue?

[X.]

Only you can truly answer that.

[ozzylogic]

i've just watched the first 30 min of the Soderbergh version and it's as expected....a series of pretentious wanking,should i continue?

Do, or do not. There is no try.

[madali]

Solaris [Solyaris] (Andrey Tarkovskiy, 1972)

My memory could  be lying to me. When I watched the "Solaris", the 2002 version, nine years ago, I loved it. Now I watch the more acclaimed Russian original from 1972 and I don't like it as much. Do I really like the new version better? But what separate the two "Solaris" for me, is not just the passage of nine years, but around 1500 films. How can I trust my own judgment and my own views of a film, watched so long ago, when I have now accumulated so many more films in my memory?

"Solaris" is a sci-fi film set in the future. In a spaceship orbiting the Solaris planet, they three passengers get to meet manifestation of their dreams. For Kris, his dead wife returns to me. It is not a hallucination, but an actual being, born out of his memories of her. The manifestation is his dead wife, Hari, is not really her, but when it is a creation made from his memory, how much different is it from actual reality? And if it is not reality, do we not love our memories of people? We love people, not because they are in-front of us, but because we love the memories of them. So what difference does it make?

3/5

[X.]

We love people, not because they are in-front of us, but because we love the memories of them. So what difference does it make?

Fantastic point.