February 12, 2007

• Solaris

  It’s not every day you go to the thrift store and find a copy of Tarkovsky’s ‘Solaris.’ But I did a couple days ago, and naturally I bought it (along with the second Harry Potter movie and the first two Star Wars episodes).

  I’ve been watching ‘Solaris’ slowly, and it’s a long, slow movie. There’s a Hollywood-ized version — though it’s really not a Hollywood movie — made by Stephen Soderberg and George Clooney. It’s a good movie, emphasizing the romantic aspect. Tarkovsky’s ‘Solaris,’ on the other hand, isn’t good or bad; you really have to accept it or reject it on its own terms. It emphasizes such lightweight concepts as the meaning of existence, the fabric of reality, the nature of love, madness, and suicide. It’s basically a trip to the wish-fulfilling planet, Solaris, where man’s questions about the universe take form. All the grief and self-doubt that comes with a human is reflected back by Solaris.

  There are a lot of things to mull over here, if you have the patience for Tarkovksy’s very slow, very deliberate style. Images that seem self-indulgent are actually integral, and he gives you a lot of time to figure out how. But I kept thinking about one of the themes of this movie: That man goes to space not to make contact with something larger, but to expand Earth, and make the universe smaller. One of the characters actually states this outright, even though the rest of the movie to that point has already got you thinking it.

  I was connecting this with the idea that science fiction movies have followed a similar trajectory at the same time. ’2001: A Space Odyssey’ pulled SF beyond simple genre in 1968, and was an obvious influence on ‘Solaris’ which came out four years later. Since then, SF movies about space exploration have been about exporting humanity rather than transforming it. At least, that was the theory while watching ‘Solaris.’ Maybe some smart-ass out there reading this will comment and let me know how wrong I am.

  My obvious example of this exportation is ‘Aliens,’ wherein James Cameron re-fights Vietnam in space and wins. Note that Cameron co-produced the remake of ‘Solaris.’ So there you go.

  • 6:08 am
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