Solaris [HD]

Flick Not for Many Tastes, but DVD is Film Student's Delight
This review refers to the DVD release of Solaris, the remake. Just a couple of notes from the outset:

(1) This film will not be well-liked by most people. There are a ton of spoilers in most reviews, so I'll try to boil it down for its essence to avoid ruining the unfolding of the movie should you choose to see it: a guy goes to a spaceship where weird things are happening and sees his dead wife. Maybe. That's all you need to know about the plot. The movie, some might think is slow, there's no action, it's a head-tripper, and honestly, had I not read the book before and also seen the magnificent Tarkovsky original, I might not have followed what was going on. As such, while I really enjoyed it, I can't call it either a great film nor one that is likely to appeal to a broad cross-section of movie watchers. There are some heady issues surrounding reality, consciousness, life and death, and if you take them too seriously you'll find yourself snoozing.

It's...

"Solaris" Intellectual Sci-Fi
Solaris" tells the story of a planet that reads minds, and obliges its visitors by devising and providing people they have lost, and miss. The Catch-22 is that the planet knows no more than its visitors know about these absent people. As the film opens, two astronauts have died in a space station circling the planet, and the survivors have sent back alarming messages. A psychiatrist named Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) is sent to the station, and when he awakens after his first night on board, his wife, Rheya (Natascha McElhone), is in bed with him. Some time earlier on earth, she had committed suicide.

"She's not human," Kelvin is warned by Dr. Helen Gordon (Viola Davis), one of the surviving crew members. Kelvin knows this materialization cannot be his wife, yet is confronted with a person who seems palpably real, shares memories with him and is flesh and blood. The other survivor, the goofy Snow (Jeremy Davies), asks, "I wonder if they can get pregnant?"

This story originated...

Intriguing mood piece
Since nobody had the wherewithal or wisdom to re-release "2001" in the actual year 2001, a remake of Andrei Tarkovsky's comparable "Solaris" in 2002 would seem the next best thing. Like those two earlier films, Steven Soderbergh's latest work is something of an "art" science fiction film, far more concerned with philosophy and theme than with action and suspense. This may make the film a tough slog for modern day audiences who have been conditioned to be jolted out of their seats every five minutes while watching films of this genre. But for the deeper thinkers among us, "Solaris" offers a fairly intriguing sci-fi vision of the afterlife, a sort of new religious paradigm for the twenty-first century.

George Clooney stars as Chris Kelvin, a successful psychiatrist whose mentally ill wife - ironically enough, given his profession - killed herself a few years back. Chris is commissioned to travel to a space station orbiting the planet Solaris after strange things begin happening...

Click to Editorial Reviews