Ebert's take focuses on the human aspect of Solaris, but the other aspect of both the movie and the book that is just as appealing to me is our inability to understand the alien ocean itself. All the attempts to anthropomorphize its behavior fail, and in the end Solaris research is abandoned because the ocean is essentially inscrutable to humans. This theme is also covered in another Lem book, "Fiasco."
I love the idea of an alien, presented before us, completely available to us to interact with, and we cannot bridge the gap because we and it are so different.
It just leaves you with "What is it doing?!" which is such a wonderful contrast to the deep emotional impact that its behavior (creating the doppelgangers) has on humans. Does it know? Is it coincidence? Is it malicious? So many good mysteries.
The aliens in the Expanse universe are also very alien and difficult to understand. Which makes their technology and civilization (for the Ring Builders) quite interesting. But yes, the point of the book and even the 2002 movie was that Solaris wasn't human, and yet we keep trying to understand it as it if were a mirror. That seeking out alien life is really just seeking out more versions of humanity.
Which was Lem's way of criticizing popular science fiction. Most aliens are either presented as humanoid or monsters from our nightmares. But Solaris is something else entirely. I would say the Arrival aliens are pretty alien as well, even though they do manage to communicate their language to the main character.
There's a lot in Solaris (at least in the 1976 movie and the book). In almost all sci-fi which contains aliens, they're easily comprehend-able by humans - they have motivations we can describe in our own language, a physical form that while strange is likely a mashup of earth creature characteristics (after all that's where our vocabulary comes from). Solaris asks what it might be like if this isn't the case, and where the limits of our comprehension are.
There is another great story by Lem called Golem XIV about an AI, constructed by the US Military. It is tasked with destroying enemies of the US, to which it says something to the effect of "Why? That makes no sense" and proceeds to give a philosophical lecture, then sort of disappears. Lem was really good at breaking down common scifi tropes and presenting them from a point of view it hasn't been considered, sometimes surprisingly obvious.
Solaris is my favorite Tarkovsky film. Some observations:
* When they assist the exhausted Kelvin to his room near the end, his body blocks the light but occasionally his body moves so the light can come through and blind the camera. This parallels the discussion about destroying the visitors with a burst of light.
* Burton's extended unexplained car ride is (in my opinion) a nod to the 2001 star-gate. It's quite brilliant how Tarkovsky shows that what Kubrick achieves with exotic special effects can be achieved with everyday footage if we just look from the right angles and play the right soundtrack.
* In the old footage they watch near the start of the film, we see stylistic artwork of important figures in the background. These would certainly be informed by Tarkovsky's expertise on Orthodox Iconography (see his "Andrei Rublev").
* Interesting to compare and contrast the visitors with Kubrick's "HAL". The visitors are purely physical and totally unaware of where they are/what's going on. HAL is purely mental and totally omniscient. Both raise all kinds of interesting metaphysical questions about personality and the soul.
* The swirling water-plants at the beginning and end of the film are evoked by the paper strips the crew hang up on their ventilators.
* Near the beginning, Kelvin stands outside in pouring rain, as if not noticing it, when he could escape it by walking just a few feet. This becomes very meaningful with part of the twist in the ending.
* Young Burton talks about how gigantic the child he saw in Solaris's ocean was. Later, when the visitor is frozen from the dry-ice suicide attempt, we briefly catch a glimpse of her face reflected in a concave mirror which makes it seem monstrously gigantic.
What do you mean unexplained? They clearly were showing the future. The multi-level Tokyo highways were percieved as extremely futuristic by the soviet audience. There was nothing like that in the Union at the time.
Definitely. But the length of the first-person driving scene is unexplained in the story universe, and feels somewhat out of place in Tarkovsky’s own body of work. I would agree it conceptually mirrors the “2001” stargate sequence.
Perhaps all that counts for you but all I'm getting from it is "stuff happens" and you're picking up patterns which may or may not be there, and if they are then so what. It sounds very typical of 70s films. However I have read Stanislaw Lemand respect him so I'm working up the courage to try and watch it sometime. Trouble is I know I'm going to be bored crapless and wish I hadn't.
If anyone can convince me I'm wrong I'd like that.
You're certainly right. All Tarkovsky's films are astonishingly boring. It takes a lot to be able to appreciate that sort of film. Learning to enjoy boredom is one of the greatest things I've developed in my life. It's like a superpower, it enables me to read vast quantities of dry but wonderful nonfiction, for example. I wish I had developed this power decades ago, but maybe that wouldn't have been possible without the necessary life experience.
I think it just requires a reframing of what to expect. Films from Tarkovsky or other capital D Directors "of Director's Directors fame" are less plot driven. Films from older eras are less plot driven / hadn't developed the tempo of modernity (I'd summarize the tempo change as needing to lead the viewer into what's next). Combine them both and you get something that feels like watching paint dry, the catch being the paint dries on 120ft of canvas. You're in the museum and the tapestry moves. Rather than trying to constantly figure out what's next / where this is going (you don't notice this in modern films as the tempo has already fed it to you / shuttled you along to the next plot point), just sit there and enjoy the view. In Stalker the shots are (op/im)pressively long. And I love them.
Personally I don't find his films boring at all. They are definitely slow-paced, but are totally engrossing for me. I have to assume a lot of the people who praise Tarkovsky so highly also don't find his films "astonishingly boring"
Tarkovsky, the director, is considered one of the greatest ever. He's not just some random Russian director, or some random 70s director. And he only made seven movies. Based on those facts alone, I would think it'd be worth seeing at least one or two of the seven. If you're into sf your best bets are Solaris or Stalker. Personally I prefer Stalker, but Solaris is also great.
There's plenty more that could be said about Tarkovsky, Solaris, Stalker, or his other films, but for me at least those facts alone would be enough to take a look.
Just yesterday I learned something about the translations of this book:
Note, there are two translations of Solaris. The bad one is from 1970, which was translated from Polish to French and then from French into English. All physical print versions of Solaris in English use this translation.
In 2011, the first direct translation of Solaris into English was published in audiobook and ebook. It's only available digitally, but this is the one you want to read.
Solaris inverts the space epic dynamic of the human mind overcoming space with new technology. Solaris presents the human mind as the ultimate limit to our exploration rather than technology. For this reason, Tarkovsky puts a lot of time in the movie to exploring the main characters existing mental climate so that as viewers we feel the claustrophobia, the scientific problem of understanding the planet Solaris proven moot in comparison to the constricting consequences of our own mental model.
At least in the American version of Solaris I felt like it asked if what we “know” or remember about a person is real / enough to make a person / how much we can even know…. and by extension what we really know about anything.
And regarding the character in the end who chooses to simply live with those memories/ ghosts created by his memory… maybe he isn’t any different than the rest of us.
My personal philosophy on truth is that it is simply what remains. In regards to our minds, these are our memories that persist for reasons we often never understand but are profound nonetheless
One interesting problem in the book is only hinted at in the movie. It is basically a form of moral philosophy science fiction.
The issue is this: According to traditional Christian morality, God can forgive all sins (salvation). Like the fact that Kelvin was partly responsible for the suicide of his wife. But Kelvin doesn't believe in God, this is an outdated thing from the past. So he is left with secular morality, where the only person who can forgive him is the person he affected. But his wife is dead, she can't forgive him anymore. So Kelvin has to live with his guilt.
Except...
Solaris seems to offer him something unbelievable, namely a second chance: A recreation of his wife, so that he can reconcile with her. But if she forgives him, what is this worth? Isn't she just a copy, a different person?
I am not going to try to compare the 2002 Soderbergh film version, but I like how they both compare the human mind to an a nearly unknowable alien (ocean of clones that appear on the ship)
I haven't read or seen the full 1972 version, but does anyone know if this line is in Stanislaw Lem's book?
"“We're proud of ourselves.
But when you think about it,
our enthusiasm's a sham.
We don't want other worlds. We want mirrors.” -it is from the 2002 screenplay, but I am curious if it has any analogue in the Polish book or Russian film.
I see the following in the English kindle version - seems like it’s the same in spirit:
“We’re humanitarian and noble, we’ve no intention of subjugating other races, we only want to impart our values to them and in return, to appropriate their heritage. We see ourselves as Knights of the Holy Contact. That’s another falsity. We’re not searching for anything except people. We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. One world is enough, even there we feel stifled. We desire to find our own idealized image; they’re supposed to be globes, civilizations more perfect than ours; in other worlds we expect to find the image of our own primitive past.”
Something I felt reading the book that I did not feel with the movie was a bit of horror sci-fi vibes. That alone to me is what makes Solaris one of Lem's top works, on which the crude descriptions add to the suspense and horror.
the bit where visitor-Hari punches through a metal door, injuring herself, because she can't stand being separated from Kelvin is quite scary, and was a shock to me when i first saw the fil in the mid 70s. and there are others.
Which is also the newer translation[1]. For quite a while couldn't be sold in the US as book/ebook due to licensing issues, only as an audiobook (which is how I enjoyed it).
Which would probably explain as well why only Amazon can sell it. I've been trying to buy only Kobo as of late, but the book literally does not exist (in English) in their library:
> I saw his 1972 film "Solaris" at the Chicago Film Festival that year. It was my first experience of Tarkovsky, and at first I balked. It was long and slow and the dialogue seemed deliberately dry. But then the overall shape of the film floated into view, there were images of startling beauty, then developments that questioned the fundamental being of the characters themselves, and finally an ending that teasingly suggested that everything in the film needed to be seen in a new light. There was so much to think about afterwards, and so much that remained in my memory.
This might be seen as heresy by many but: if you're not a fan of the glacial pace of very old films, you may enjoy Clooney's remake more.
This takes nothing away from the original film, which inspired so much of modern scifi. But if you were raised on modern sci fi, Tarkovsky's original is a hard watch. You might feel the same in the nineties listening to Sonic Youth's 80s grunge, or reading Lord of the Rings after you've read the Song of Ice and Fire / Game of Thrones books, or playing System Shock 1 after growing up on Bioshock and Prey.
The newer film stands on its own pretty well, it doesn't really need to be compared against the previous film. There are enough ideas behind Solaris that yet another film could be made based on that material (and probably will be, someday).
The most obvious variation would be shorter still: a film similar to Clooney's remake, but without quite so much development of what was already a dead character (Kelvin's ex) and without the softening of what was objectively a pretty bleak ending. But I think the newer film actually works really well. All the other people who were seated in the theater when I went to see it during its theatrical release seemed to feel the same way. All three of them.
I agree, the Soderbergh/Clooney version is fine as well. Though I wish movie adoptions of books wouldn't so often replace bleak endings with less bleak ones. It feels almost patronizing. Like a mother who reads a book to her children for which she thinks they are slightly too young, so she replaces more serious parts with watered down fragments she invented herself.
It's been so long since I read the novel, my recollection of the end might be wrong. In my memory Kelvin is still alive at the end of the novel, which makes it technically a less bleak ending than what Soderbergh did (although that last scene in the film puts a more benevolent spin on the situation than is warranted, which didn't quite ring true). But it might be time to revisit all of that, I wouldn't mind reading it again.
Watching the film again is easy, but the novel is an interesting case. Apparently the best English translation (the only direct translation to English) is not available in print, only as an audio book.
The ending in the book is more rational and disillusioned. Bleak is probably the wrong term. Though for me it is now also long since I watched the movies or read the book.
The direct Johnston translation is also available as ebook, the Kindle version uses it. I just looked at it and the writing is still not super fluent for my taste. But this might be due to the fact that it was a mid-early Lem novel. In his later (especially more humorous) books, his writing style got much more witty and playful.
I think the Clooney film is excellent, and can be enjoyed without knowing anything about Lem's book. And it just might be enough to make you want to dig in to the source material.
I don’t know re: Grunge. I feel like in the mid nineties Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins were already taking grunge to new places and Sonic Youth had evolved into something else entirely - Diamond Sea was the first Sonic Youth track I heard and was this weird desolate digital thing.
I fell asleep to the remake, but was transfixed when I saw the original for the first time around age 7. Sure, it's long, but to me at least it hits much harder. The new one doesn't feel like it is about Solaris (the planet), to me. It feels much less interesting.
Then again I'm old enough to perhaps be more used to the pace of it.
the issue I had with the Soderbergh/Clooney version is it almost stops being about Solaris at all, and is instead just about the individuals.
What was brilliant about the novel (to me) was that it was about our inability to understand of communicate with the alien intellegence, while at the same time, we are unable to understand and communicate with others of our own species. The two threads mirror each other, and almost completely removing one, leaves it a less interesting story. The Tarkovsy version doesn't do a great job of this either, but Solaris plays a bigger role, so you at least get an inkling of the ocean mirroring our own inadaquacies.
> This might be seen as heresy by many but: if you're not a fan of the glacial pace of very old films, you may enjoy Clooney's remake more.
I agree. I have both versions, and while it would be easy to knock the latter given the reputation of the former, I think they're both good in different ways.
For long paced old school sci-fi, The Andromeda Strain (1971) is a much better watch. I wouldn't even call Solaris (1976) a proper sci-fi movie, it's a philosophical drama set in sci-fi space milieu.
I'm with you. It's a serious snoozefest. It is not cinema so I disagree about generational shift*. The problem is foundational. It's a novel, not a film. Interior space of man is not very cinematic from the outside. (Yes, I know few giants of film disagree.)
imho, an absolute gem of Sci-Fi that still works. This is also a 'slow pace' film, there is also a great deal of matter happening inside the characters' heads, but it still works as film. (hn bonus: CalTech and JPL are in the credits.)
Part of the problem is that there are multiple slow "art sequences" in the film that seem to have no clear purpose and run counter to Tarkovsky's usual dislike of intentional symbolism in film. Some seem like they might have been intended as homages to other sci-fi films, especially Kubrick's 2001.
Which "art sequences" do you mean? The zero g part with Bach and Bruegel's "Hunters in the Snow" is one of the most iconic scenes in film history (in my book).
If you enjoyed the movie, I absolutely recommend reading the novel by Lem. It is less mystical and much more analytical/philosophical than the Tarkovsky movie. (And the ending actually makes sense, which I found to be somewhat of a weak point of the Tarkovsky adoption.)
But be sure that you read the new English ebook translation by Bill Johnston! The old Kilmartin/Cox translation was a retranslation from a French translation, and it's not good.
Coincidentally started reading Solaris 2 weeks ago. About 60% in and really enjoying it. Love stories with novel sci-fi ideas and this one tackles a pretty interesting one. Would appreciate recommendations by the same author or other stories.
Other stories that I really liked because I had not thought about those ideas before are: Diaspora (Greg Egan), Permutation City (Greg Egan), Dark Universe (daniel galouye), Three Body Problem series (Cixin Liu)
I read pretty much all of his books. My favorite is "Wizja Lokalna", I've read the German translation, but there is no English one. Other books of his are available in English though: I like The Cyberiad and The Star Diaries, both quite funny. The former is about the adventures of the two great robot constructors Trurl and Klapaucius, the latter about the journeys of Ijon Tichy, a kind of space Munchausen. Tichy also plays the main role in the the later books The Futurological Congress, Peace on Earth, and "Wizja Lokalna" (which doesn't have a translation, as I said.) All these novels are often quite funny, unlike Solaris.
He has also written other great but much more unusual books, such as Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (a Kafkaesque story set inside an underground Pentagon which was cut off from the rest of the world) or A Perfect Vacuum (a collection of reviews of books which do not exist.)
I think there's a (probably US) film that appears to be inspired by "Solaris" but is called something different. Can anyone tell me what it's called because I can't remember and it's annoying me?
sort of a haiku almost, this revue. The real movie takes time to develop the base plot, by indirection and example instead of prose description like this review. The "answers" provided in the review as descriptions are basically accurate, but the viewer has to puzzle it out, and it is never said directly by the movie.
This movie has stuck with me for decades. I still refer to it when we get the "Star Trek" irrational exuberance crowd around spending multi-billions on space adventures. Secondly how about those small sats eh? Maybe not every space mission has to be decades long with budgets that match.
I'm very glad I read the story before the movie review, he really loads it up with spoilers! To make the point that the details weren't what he found interesting.
I ran a poll once for the movie people most wanted to see. The leaders were Solaris and The Big Lebowski. It was very close, but I, um, "encouraged" some people on the fence to vote Solaris.
Accusations of "election fraud" are misplaced! This is called "getting out the vote."
Yeah. Without seeing the context of the review, it's hard to say why it seems a bit thin. I'd just note that newspapers and magazines routinely ran capsule reviews of things they considered of lower interest to their audience--which Solaris would presumably have been for Chicago Sun Times readers.
Ebert certainly had a serious film critic side but he was mostly pretty mid-brow.
I love the idea of an alien, presented before us, completely available to us to interact with, and we cannot bridge the gap because we and it are so different.
It just leaves you with "What is it doing?!" which is such a wonderful contrast to the deep emotional impact that its behavior (creating the doppelgangers) has on humans. Does it know? Is it coincidence? Is it malicious? So many good mysteries.