Review: Solaris 451
Lem's novel is a really good work of sci-fi, not light reading but worth the effort to comprehend. The new Solaris movie is only 90-odd minutes long, and at that it's too long.
Comparisons will be made to 2001 and Apocalypse Now, two other slow-moving, philosophical movies. The problem is that both of those movies actually had interesting things to say, and managed to keep the viewer's attention despite being slow-paced. Solaris is simply slow. Long sections of the movie have no dialog and no background sounds whatsoever. When there is background music, it lacks the classical majesty of 2001 and is actually a bit annoying. These flaws might be forgivable if we were truly interested in the plot, but we aren't: it's a trivial love story, told many times before. (Most of the interesting parts of Lem's book have been sliced away to leave only the love tale, and the sci-fi twist is not enough to save it, IMHO.) I found myself nodding off during parts of the movie.
A couple of the reviews I read didn't quite grasp what was going on, especially the end. I found it quite clear and straightforward: the movie gives you plenty of clues so there shouldn't be any doubt left in your mind when the credits roll. Admittedly I approached the film with substantial knowledge about the book, but... it should have been clear to anyone.
Overall: it's pretty. The effects are well-done, at least you aren't short-changed there. As far as sci-fi movies go, it isn't bad - there have been so many worse sci-fi movies that I'll take whatever I can get. And at least they had the decency to make it short; if this movie were 2.5 hours long instead of 1.5, it would be intolerable. I'd recommend it to sci-fi fans. I'm not sure I'd recommend it for non-fans, however; if you want a love story, go see Ghost or something.
wtf (Score:4, Insightful)
Bad adaptation (Score:5, Insightful)
invisible car (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand, most of us loved Wonder Woman's invisible plane. This goes to show that, contrarily to the series' directors' ideas, the more Bond becomes a cartoonish super-hero parody of himself, the less we like him.
We're getting movies made that are pre-edited for tv showings, now. I miss the Bond from the actual stories (remember books?), which at least pretended to have Bond barely scrape through, and which showed far more grey in the world.
Bond, James Bond. (Score:5, Insightful)
James Bond films don't need reviewing. Everyone knows exactly what they're going to get
There is no pretension, unlike other films mentioned here, just good old-fashioned fun.
It's funny how there are more comments about Bond than Solaris.
invisible (Score:2, Insightful)
The invisible car was bad? (Score:2, Insightful)
What is the Solaris? (Score:2, Insightful)
Better go soon if you're interested (Score:2, Insightful)
Addmittedly, I haven't seen the film yet, but it looks suspiciously like another Soderbergh-Clooney "wouldn't-it-be-cool-to-remake" vanity project like Ocean's Eleven. Soderbergh's been coasting on the goodwill from Erin Brokovich and Traffic long enough. Unless he wants to turn into Brian DePalma, he'd better start cranking out hits again, IMHO.
Re:Invisible Car?! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Solaris trailer (Score:2, Insightful)
blah dee blah blah blahh
de deeble de blah de blah blah
blah blah de beedeleeblah
de blah de deeble blah dah.
Re:007 (Score:1, Insightful)
Not true! Look at the old Bond films. Some of them had black women in them, too. Movies were much less politically correct when they were produced than movies are now. They're simply following tradition: Mr. Bond boinks hot black chicks, too. If all you eat is white rice all the time, wouldn't you want to treat yourself to some wild rice every now and then? Oh, yeah!
Re:Don't dis the invisible car (Score:3, Insightful)
Bond's car, like many of his toys, is clearly over the top (ie, the above ideas are obviously refined), but is still within the realm of possibility, though it is improbable. With bond's films you don't have to suspend belief very much at all. Besides, they camouflage the use of improbable technology with explosions and girls, and hey, it obviously works.
-Adam
Die Another Day (Score:5, Insightful)
Bond movies are known for their fancy opening scenes. I wasn't particularly impressed with this opening scene. It wasn't awful. But it wasn't memorable either.
At the start of the movie, Bond is detained in a camp in North Korea. Since he is detained for a while, he looks skanky. WTF!!! Bond is not supposed to look skanky, Bond is supposed to be slutty.
Speaking of slutty, Bond is not slutty enough in this movie. He only sleeps with two women in the whole movie. That is well below standard. I could even pull that off.
The "invisible" Aston Martin was definitly a cool special effect. The entire theatre "wowed" in unison when it made it's first appearance. The Ford Thunderbird was pretty kick ass too.
In general, Die Another Day was a decent Bond movie, but not one of the best. And Pierce Brosnan is definitely getting too old to be Bond.
Solyaris vs. Solaris (Score:2, Insightful)
But knowing the attention span of the regular hollywood movie viewer it was probably cut to 10 seconds.
After Vanilla Sky, The Ring (and surely many more i've forgotten) yet another hollywood remake. They surely run out of ideas don't they?
Taking a chance (Score:5, Insightful)
So what it's slow? The cinematography combined with the music create truly eerie moments. It is nice to be able this kind of stuff at the Cineplex and not just at the small art theater once in a while!
So there it is folks: if you like Blade Runner, Gattaca, music like Brian Eno's or simply want to take a chance, go see this movie! I think you'll like it.
Solaris was not good (Score:3, Insightful)
Classical majesty? Wow, we think differently. Because of this movie, 2001, I can't stand to listen to that Blue Danube waltz anymore. Playing the same thing, over and over again, and then playing a different section of the same piece, over and over again. I felt like I couldn't breath when watching it.
Anyway, Solaris was a bad movie. The story was really, really, cool, but the movie was not good. Not at all. The sequences where we stared at Natasha McElhone were too long and too frequent-- it seemed they were more space fillers (in a short movie?) than an attempt at displaying George Clooney's memories of her. The guy playing the spaced-out California surfer dude was funny, but that was the high point of the movie for me. I haven't read the book, but I KNOW it gives a really interesting story that the movie Solaris doesn't know how to explain. You can say the movie was good if you're afraid that some "intellectual" can better explain its virtues, but the truth is, it sucked. Don't be afraid to say it. It sucked.
Re:wtf (Score:5, Insightful)
"This is such a hopelessly short review that I have no idea what the commenter actually thought of the film."
He was pretty clear in the review. It had good points (visually impressive), it had bad points (plot was overworked and unoriginal), some groups might like it (sci-fi fans), some might not (non sci-fi fans).
Not trying to be a dick, but this is a farily good review. Most people take the tact that if they don't like it, it sucked, period, and you won't (or shouldn't) either. Michael had the presence of mind to look at this from more than one angle.
Re:Jumped the Shark (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd like to jump her shark ....
Re:invisible car (Score:5, Insightful)
> parody of himself, the less we like him.
Bond's always been a cartoonish self-parody. Sweet lord. Remember You Only Live Twice? Remember when Sean Connery went undercover as a Japanese person, his disguise consisting of a black mop-top wig and blackface? Remember Goldfinger, with "Pussy Galore's Flying Circus", that crack team of implicitely-lesbian ace pilots? Remember The Man With The Golden Gun? "Soon I shall fashion a weapon out of solar power! Mwuuuahaha!" Shit, man -- Moonraker? Octopussy? Live And Let Die?
I love all these movies. I read most of the James Bond books as a kid, and am pretty sure I've seen all the (old) movies at some point. But don't kid yourself -- the Bond series was always ludicrous. It's a glorious caricature of '60s badassitude.
Real spies are hunchbacked bureaucrats and dissatisfied knowledge workers. Any other depictions of the Spy's Life should set your bullshit meter to ten.
Should have been better (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this movie was misrepresented by the ads, it was presented as a space science fiction thriller. Sci-fi fans expected to see another Star Wars or another Alien movie, the women were bought off by G.C.'s naked rear-end. I was there hoping to see a different point of view that should have been different in a Hollywood way, in a way that commercializes any idea and delivers it for the masses to consume in large volumes, however I was surprised how poorly they did what they were supposed to do - make this movie into something that would awaken interest of the above mentioned consumers. They took a mindless road of rephrasing what the Russian movie has delivered. This was not the road this Hollywood movie should have taken. The Russian movie was doomed to success, this new movie is simply doomed. The new movie took a simple approach - they adopted the Russian movie (not the book, now I know that for sure) and took out all the parts that actually had to do with science at all.
There was no good explanation on nature of Solaris, there was no attempt on the part of the crew to try and communicate with the ocean by sending Kelvin's encephalograms to it through X-Rays. The movie could have been better if only it had at least some of that. At least Kelvin should have taken his wife's blood and compared it to his own blood under an electronic microscope to see that her blood cells did not consist of atoms. In the new movie Kelvin's wife did not even attempt to brake the door when Kelvin left, she did not rock the rocket before she was launched into the orbit, and Kelvin's face was not burned by the launching rocket.
Oh, sure, there were some Hollywood tricks of the trade in place - like poor attempts to confuse the viewers who were trying to understand who is a clone and who is real, but it did not help much. Snaut (in the book he was an old man with gray hair who killed his clone) was too obvious and looked ridiculous in his attempts to misrepresent reality of the situation (watch the movie, I am not going to spoil it for you.)]
The Russian movie ended with some closure, this new adoptation ended with a usual Hollywood trick that did not help making this movie any more attractive to the general public. It is true, many of the people in the theater left before the end of the movie and most of the rest were confused and left out of the plot, many of them did not understand what was going on! That is not the way to treat a great book like Solaris! I am not saying that the producer should have gone completely by the book but this is Hollywood, and he should have made it more watchable to the lowest common denominator, the people who do not have patience and lack imagination (thank you Hollywood and the Fox channel) to complete the untold story.
Now I hope that there will be another release of Solaris by Wachowski brothers, that should show a different point of view
I still say - go and watch it, but also read the book and watch the original. If nothing else, this should give you a perspective on different approaches and styles that exist, maybe you can come up with your own representation of the story, test your own imagination.
Cheers
Re:Bad adaptation (Score:5, Insightful)
No, Solaris won't be a success. Film nerd won't give it a chance because Clooney's in it, sci-fi nerds will claim it's unferior to Lem's book and most 'normal people' will find it 'too slow' (whatever the fuck that means). This is a shame, because the movie really is pretty good, all things considered. Ah well.
Soderberg's Film a Total Failure (Score:5, Insightful)
Tarkovsky's 1972 film version of Solaris downplayed (but kept) the science fiction, put more emphasis on the love story, and created a second subplot involving estrangement of the hero (Kris Kelvin) from his father. The new subplot required a prologue (considerable material not in the novel) that was the foundation for a plot twist at the end. Lem was appalled by the liberties Tarkovsky had taken with the novel. Lem said Tarkovsky "didn't make Solaris at all, he made Crime and Punishment." The crime is Kelvin's failure to recognize and thwart his wife's suicidal impulses; the punishment is agonizing pangs of conscience. Lem was also turned off by the film's visually clever but substantively corrupt ending, which he called "just totally awful." This ending, besides reintroducing Kelvin's father, transforms an uncomprehending ocean into one that is comprehending, sympathetic, and supposedly helpful.
Soderberg's 2001 film virtually eliminates the science fiction, keeping only the sci-fi setting. What we get is a dreary, dialogue-laden love story with a silly, sappy ending. In effect if not literally, this ending transforms Solaris into a metaphorical ghost story, complete with a metaphorical heaven.
A more detailed comparison of Lem's novel, Tarkovsky's 1972 film, and Soderberg's 2002 remake will make my points clearer. Spoiler's follow, so if you haven't seen the films you might want to cut out now.
LEM'S NOVEL
The centerpiece of Lem's novel is the planet's living, sentient ocean. This ocean not only has (a) sensory powers, it has (b) an incredibly high level of mathematical intelligence (it can control its own orbit within a binary star system that should create orbital instability, and it can perform the calculations necessary for this control), (c) the power to manipulate matter into physical forms, (d) the power to read (but not truly comprehend) human minds, (d) the aforementioned the power to alter its orbit in ways that defy natural gravitational and centrifugal forces (a power analogous to mobility), and (e) apparently consciousness.
Earth sends scientists to Solaris to study the planet; they live in a space station that orbits the planet. While they sleep the ocean reads their minds, or at least the dark areas thereof. From what it finds (apparently without comprehending), the ocean creates for each scientist a "visitor" - a living replica of a person from the scientist's past who is a source of shame or sorrow. In Kelvin's case, the visitor is his dead wife, whose suicide was facilitated by Kelvin's behavior. In the case of Gibarian case (a second scientist whose visitor drove him to suicide), the visitor is an obese, bare-breasted Negress who lies with his frozen corpse and seems to imply a sexual fetish, hence a source of profound embarrassment. The idea behind these visitors probably comes from the 1956 sci-fi film Forbidden Planet, which featured "monsters from the id."
The surviving scientists eventually find a way to get rid of the visitors. (The scientists build a "neutrino disruptor" that destabilizes the material structure of the visitors.) But by then the visitors have served their two purposes - illustrating the nature and power of the ocean and giving the plot what little life it has. The scientists then decide to return to earth. But Kelvin takes a "flitter" craft on a last-minute exploratory flight over the planet. What he finds changes his mind about leaving: he decides to stay despite the absence of any real hope of ever comprehending the ocean.
Lem's novel has a lot in common with Arthur Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. Both novels are long on description of scientific finds and short on plot. In Clarke's novel, the long descriptive passages deal technology, the technology behind a coasting space ship that enters the solar system and loops around the sun before restarting its engines and heading back to where it came from. In Lem's novel the descriptive passages deal with Solaris' ocean and with theories of what that ocean is. The ocean is the analog of the spaceship Rama's technology. After a while, the descriptive passages in both novels become boring. Both need more plot.
TARKOVSKY'S 1972 FILM
Tarkovsky obviously recognized the plot limitations of Lem's novel and set out to spice things up a bit. He did this by shoving the science fiction into the background and focusing on the relationship (described partly in flashbacks) between Kelvin and his dead but reconstituted wife. In doing so, Tarkovsky introduces a whole lot more pathos than you find in the novel. In Lem's words, "what we get in the film is only how this abominable Kelvin has driven poor Harey [his wife] to suicide and then he has pangs of conscience which are amplified by her appearance."
These pangs of conscience are not at all entertaining, and neither are they science fiction. They are simply an abortive (in my case, at least) attempt to play on our heartstrings with a lot of emotional drivel. Tarkovsky probably realized that he could get only so far plotwise with the husband-and-wife subplot, so he created that second subplot.
The new subplot begins in the prologue, back on earth. Kris has a falling out with his elderly father. The conflict so poorly handled by Tarkovsky that I didn't realize anything serious had occurred until I read in a review that Kris and his father had become estranged. All we see in the prologue is that Kris is skeptical about a certain detail of an account by Berton, an astronaut, of Berton's experiences on Solaris. Berton is an old friend of Kris's father, so when Berton is offended the father is also offended. But this conflict didn't strike me as anything more than a run-of-the-mill disagreement. The prologue also hints that the father is terminally ill. The father says to Kelvin, "Are you jealous that he [Berton], not you, will bury me?"
Skip to the ending: SPOILER COMING UP. We see Kris preparing to leave Solaris and return to earth with the other two surviving scientists. Then we see Kris, apparently back on earth, outside his father's rural cottage. It is raining. Kris looks in through the window and sees water from a leaky roof - a roof that was not leaky during rain in the prologue - dripping into the room. (What sort of symbolism is this? Is the cottage weeping?) The father comes out. Kris falls on his knees and grasps his father. He has been given the chance to make amends with his father, a chance that he was denied with his wife. The camera then pulls slowly away from the scene, climbing higher and higher into the sky. And at last we see that the cabin, the farm, and the father are on an island on Solaris. They are creations of the sentient ocean.
Any sentimental satisfaction or esthetic appreciation evoked by this final scene disappears when you reflect on it. The father is no more real than Kris's reconstituted wife was. Kris is a prisoner, incarcerated on an island. He will be devoid of human contact, apart from contact with his artificial father, for the rest of his life. No travel, no trips to town, no friends, no entertainment, no books, no scientific work. Tarkovsky may think this ending is uplifting, but I found it depressing. And still a poor substitute for genuine plot.
SODERBERG'S 2002 FILM
Like Tarkovsky, Soderberg seems to have recognized that turning Lem's novel into a film would require more plot than Lem provided. And he wants to be original. Well, not really original, but different from Tarkovsky. MORE SPOILERS COMING UP. So Soderberg almost totally abandons the science fiction and turns the story into a three-way cross between a soap opera, a Hollywood tear-jerker, and a ghost story embellished with an analogical heaven.
The ending again finds Kris remaining on Solaris. But this isn't the real Kris. We never learn what happened to the real Kris. What we do learn is that this Kris is another of the ocean's replicants, a visitor with nobody to visit. Soderberg prepares us for this revelation by introducing a second plot twist. Just before the end we learn that Snow, one of the other two living scientists on the space station, is really a replicant. He killed the real Snow before Kris arrived. We thus know that the ocean creates replicants not only of shame-inducing persons from the scientists' pasts (those monsters from the id) but replicants of the scientists themselves.
We next see Kris with his wife. The two replicants are going to live happily ever after on Solaris in a physical replica of their apartment back on earth. Kris and his wife, as mere simulacrums, are the equivalent of ghosts. The star-crossed lovers are being given a second chance - as ghosts. They have been reunited in a metaphorical heaven. They will enjoy a happily-ever-after life beyond the grave.
I'm sorry, Mr. Soderberg, but ghost stories and images of heaven are no substitute for science fiction. A romantic subplot is not objectionable. What is unreasonable is the attempt to palm off as science fiction an idiotic love story that is totally out of touch with Lem's novel. And beyond this fault is the gaping hole in the plot: what became of the real Kris? If he went back to earth and is still alive, then that second chance is an illusion. The real Kris is not experiencing it. Indeed, the real Kris is not experiencing the second chance no matter what became of him. And if the real Kris was murdered by the murderous replicant of Snow, that's even less of a happy ending. You can't have it both ways, Mr. Soderberg; you have to think things through.
Even Spielbergo could have done better... (Score:1, Insightful)
Okay, I guess there are a lot of themes in the book that can be interpreted and focused on for the purposes of making a watchable movie, but to not even describe the history or any detail about the planet Solaris *at all* really irks me. I mean they hardly even mention the planet. Hello? The movie is called SOLARIS, after the fricken planet! Someone who hadn't read the book is going to come out of there wondering what that weird glowing planet in the background had to do with the movie. WTF?! No wonder all the critics are calling it a confusing mess of a story. They assume that Lem is somekind of incomprehensible philosophical weirdo, when really Soderberg is the one who left the book's plot out. Jeez!