Steven Soderbergh has had a lot of ups and downs as a director, coming to a momentary halt after his underrated neo-noir The Underneath failed to grab audiences and dollars (the cap to a string of near misses after sex, lies and videotape), and most recently announced his retirement, only for his IMDB page to list an upcoming miniseries under his direction. Only half of his movies ever made money, or at least broke even, and one of the more unjust cases is Solaris, a movie remarkable for having been made less than 15 years ago with George Clooney of all people at the helm...and its DVD has gone out of print. Normally an out-of-print studio movie from that soon ago means big collector value, but oddly enough there are acres of cheap used DVD's that sellers just can't get to move. Not even GEORGE CLOONEY's bubble-adorned face, as well as James Cameron's name stamped on the top, can get people to spring for the thing, and of all the movies of his to slip through the cracks this one is among the most tragic (considering that The Underneath and King of the Hill are getting the royal Criterion treatment). I've heard that the failure of Solaris has been attributed to poor advertising, which pitched it as a love story IN SPACE...and feature hideous light rock music in at least one trailer. The actual movie is one of the best and most thought provoking sci-fi movies made in the last 20 years, and it deserves a hell of a lot more exposure than its piss-poor marketing campaign secured.
Set a few generations into the future, Clooney plays Chris Kelvin, a therapist who is contacted by Dr. Gilbarian, an old friend of his (Ulrich Tukur, The Lives of Others) whose mission to the distant planet of Solaris has gone mysteriously pear-shaped. While Gilbarian doesn't specify what is going on, the company who funded the mission wants Kelvin to go out there and try to convince the crew to come home, as their previous rescue attempts have failed. Upon arriving, Clooney finds Gilbarian and another crew member dead, the scientist Dr. Gordon (Viola Davis, Prisoners) locked in her room by her own choosing, and Snow (Jeremy Davies, Lost) at a loss to explain exactly what's happening. After a day of stonewalling Kelvin goes to sleep and dreams of his wife Rheya (Natascha McElhone, feardotcom), and is shocked to find her sitting on his bed when he wakes up. This is doubly shocking considering that his wife has been dead for some time, yet here she is. Frightened and confused, Kelvin tricks her into crawling into an escape pod and sends her away, hoping that he was just seeing things. Unfortunately, the truth is much more unnerving - each of the people on the ship has been visited by a kind of apparition of a loved one, usually dead, and the planet seems to be the culprit. Nobody knows why the beings appear, but they seem to be fully aware copies of those people, created from the memories of the ship passenger and for all intents and purposes an actual person. This doesn't sit well with Dr. Gordon, who plans to destroy her "visitor" using a higgs boson cannon (imagine that at your local gun show), a task Kelvin is none to motivated to perform on Rheya. This doesn't stop Rheya from trying to kill herself, a character detail from Kelvin's memories, though she always comes back to life, ready to love Kelvin and eventually destroy herself. As Kelvin's marital flashbacks, as well as questions of identity, ethics and alien motivation swirl and beckon, the viewer almost forgets about that ominous bloodstain in the ceiling of the infirmary, or what they're going to do about the apparition of Gilbarian's grade-school-age son.
Solaris was originally the breakout novel of Soviet sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem and was adapted to film twice before, first as a 1968 TV movie and Andrei Tarkovsky's three-hour 1973 film. I'm going to be perfectly honest - I don't have enough time in my life for Tarkovsky. I tried watching Stalker and felt like I was trapped in a special relativity time drag, and considering that Soderbergh makes a perfectly fascinating, already slow 95-minute movie with his version makes me dread the thought of watching a three-hour version with worse production value. Soderbergh's pace is calm but steady, and the use of static shots and slow dissolves is a style that works to the movie's credit, allowing the exquisite cinematography, sparse-yet-detailed production design, excellent performances and haunting music envelop the viewer. The ideas as presented in the movie are fascinating, questioning the nature of human identity and our inability to comprehend an alien universe on human terms. The balance of elements is so flowing, and the pacing is so tight, that it'd be hard to imagine it being any longer. Heck, Soderbergh was concerned that audiences would have trouble getting interested in his version, saying that if they didn't like the first 10 minutes "they might as well leave." It's movies like this that make overlong art really seem overlong, and that good storytelling is what lets the ideas really come to life. I was fortunate enough to see Solaris in the theater, but sadly I appear to have been one of the 15 who did, and there aren't any plans for a Blu-Ray or even a new DVD, which is frankly baffling considering those GEORGE CLOONEYs, JAMES CAMERONs and STEVEN SODERBERGHs on the box. The good news is there are tons of supah-cheap copies of the widescreen DVD, many of them for a onepence and waiting for your DVD player t accept them. Instead of playing you the trailer, I'll give you a sample of Cliff Martinez's elusive, haunting soundtrack, the drug that allows the viewer to slip fully into Solaris's crisply unsettling future. Give Solaris a chance and I'll see you on the far side of the cent.
~PNK
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