I dunno... maybe I was just in a bad mood, maybe in the age of the Smartphone (TM)(R)(C) anything longer than five seconds just isn't tolerable anymore. Also, I did see the 2002 version first, and... wow! That one's really short! But what the hell, it's been a while since I've actually reviewed a movie, and my cold's going to keep me up anyway...
I mean, don't get me wrong. Solaris (1972) does have some of the most beautiful cinematography of any movie; I actually wasn't expecting that... okay, no sunsets, none of the panoramas of, say, The Horse Whisperer (1998), but still. Groovy sound too, man! It's got everything you want in a European movie: lots of brooding, grandiose philosophizing in short sentences, and strange interludes. Daydreaming, even! None of the centrality of focus that, say, a movie star gets in an American movie... oh, just in case, SPOILER ALERTS. And plenty of room for philosophical debate. It's a subtler take on the central question of the Blade Runner series, maybe A.I. as well: how real can a robot be? So far, we can tell the difference... as of this writing, the robots can't be too far away from their human creators. What limits would they have? Well, in Blade Runner, they have trouble answering questions logically, and if you look deep into their synthetic eyes... you see a microchip or something. In A.I., the question is how fast can you drive away from your robotic child after abandoning it... something like that. In Solaris (1972) proper, (SPOILER ALERTS) the alien world you're floating over in a (hopefully cleaner) space station doesn't send you robots, but biologically-correct clones of the loved ones you miss. They're far from perfect, but the planet is actually working on the bugs. The synthetic clones can't sleep, occasionally suicidal, perhaps from the lack of sleep, and they seem to get rather jealous of the dead people they're clones of. I should probably mention the plot: a psychologist (psikholog) named Kris Kelvin is eventually tasked with travelling to the space station hovering over the planet Solaris... I'm not saying he's egotistical, but is he wearing a monogrammed bathrobe? Anyway, like most sci-fi movies, overly positive about our advances in the space program. Spielberg's Minority Report, also quite positive. It takes place in the year 2054... I want one of those animated boxes of cereal NOW!!!
Sorry... gotta focus here. I guess part of the gag is... that's right, even the most jaded European likes a good chuckle every now and again. What would you call it... something for the hipsters among us. Seems like part of the joke is they send a psychologist to try and fix what seems to be a psychological problem in space. When he gets there, however, and his ex-wife is reborn in imperfect form... he seems to be hooked. Enchanted, even. The host on Turner Classic Movies (TM)(C)(R) who introduced the movie kind of ruined it for me when they called Solaris the answer-film to 2001. Then again, The Village Voice called it that too... oh, it's Google Newspapers. They don't review films anymore. Go ahead; try one of their links! You'll see! Ultimately, I think 2001 will be fine. Tarkovsky certainly paid a lot of homage to the "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" sequence, if only in his more natural, low-budget kinda way. If nothing else, to get back to the psychologist's dilemma, and... SPOILER ALERT AGAIN... in my usual perverse way, I did have an appreciation for the fact that the psychologist seems to have found heaven, and he doesn't want to let it go. UNTIL, he gets a letter from his ex-wife clone saying that not only has she departed, but apparently the Solaris Clone Program has been discontinued. They're going to focus again on undersea infrastructure development. Time to go back to Earth. As for me, well... I'm too old to try and disrupt the status quo, so four stars from me. And it's available on DVD at... I'd better not say; see previous sentence. Support your local video store if you still have one!!
****
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan
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