Overall Rating
 Awesome: 19.01%
Worth A Look: 28.17%
Average: 13.38%
Pretty Bad: 16.2%
Total Crap: 23.24%
8 reviews, 94 user ratings
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| Solaris (2002) |
by Mahone
"The movie, Solaris, was everything I hoped it wouldn’t be"
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Director Steven Soderbergh has taken one of the greatest science fiction stories of the past century and given it a lobotomy with a dull butter knife; in place of the dark but coherent vision of master writer Stanislaw Lem, we get meaningless glitz, regurgitated glitter, a sanitized politically correct script, and are treated to not one, but two, lingering and gratuitous shots of George Clooney’s ass.The movie, Solaris, was everything I hoped it wouldn’t be: vapid and banal and a whole bunch of other negative adjectives. Once or twice the promise of Lem’s original idea seemed about to peek through–and it was this false hope that kept me from walking out of the theater.
Basically, the movie is about Chris Kelvin (George Clooney), a psychiatrist who is sent to space station Prometheus, orbiting the planet Solaris, to investigate strange events that are happening there. Once on board, he goes to sleep, only to awaken and find his dead wife, Rheya (Natasha McElhone), in bed with him. Other people at the station also have “visitors” and the planet Solaris is suspected of being behind the manifestations.
The central problem of Soderbergh’s Solaris is that the story’s main character (Solaris, the sentient planet) is missing: In the original plot Solaris has been trying to communicate/interact with humans for some time and by a variety of means. The phenomena occurring onboard Prometheus–probing the deepest level of the crew’s subconscious minds, their Ids, and then producing facsimiles of persons it finds there (their deepest desires)--is the latest phase of its interaction: Unfortunately, Solaris either does not understand, or care, that the higher aspects of human consciousness filter out much of the mucky desire we harbor in the deepest recesses of our minds. Though some of these harbored desires may be productive, most are not. We certainly do not want our friends and families knowing what secret desires, motivations, and guilt we harbor–and this unwanted exposure is exactly what Solaris begins doing: making the specters of our subconscious spring to life.
Of course Soderbergh’s Solaris doesn’t touch on this theme; instead, he changes it to “making the dead we once loved come back to life.”
In the book, one of the first things Chris Kelvin encounters on the space station is an anachronistically placed Negro giantess, naked save a grass skirt--the apparent manifest fantasy of one of the station’s now deceased inhabitants–walking to the morgue cooler to be with her dead progenitor. This telling encounter is altogether missing from the movie. Also in the book, another of the scientists on board will not open his door more than a crack; behind the door Kelvin hears the sound of a giggling child–a clear indication that the pederastic fantasies of the room’s occupant have come to life--to his regret. In Soderbergh’s Solaris, we do get a glance at a child running through the space station, and find that he is the dead son of the aforementioned scientist. Ah, doesn’t’ cleansing that nasty old plot feel good? Never mind that such changes hinder any meaningful interpretation of the story.
Occasionally, Lem’s vision seems about to peak through Soderbergh’s script: A dream visit to Kelvin from his deceased friend Gibarian gives us brief glimpse into what Stanislaw Lem was intending to convey, which is that we don’t always get to understand things. "There are no answers, only choices," the dream vision of Gibarian says in the movie. In Solaris, the novel, Gibarian, sums up the problem of understanding Solaris’ motives by stating: “When there are no men, there cannot be motives accessible to man.” Gibarian’s visit, sadly, is perhaps the only moment in the movie that resonates with Lem’s original idea.
There was one last-minute plot twist not found in the original story that seemed to portend interest: one of the space station’s human residents turns out to be a psychic manifestation that killed the original–but it led absolutely nowhere, leading to the conclusion that it was thrown in for giggles. In the end, it only served to further obfuscate an already tenebrous plot
There is good news for director Soderbergh: His Solaris should prove of interest to the medical community since it possess an almost anesthetic dullness. (“Molar extraction? No problem. Wait a second while I cue Solaris up.”)
Director Soderbergh took a classic work of science fiction and eviscerated its central theme; he managed to turn Mozart into disco; it’s as if he rewrote the Superman story–left out Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, Kryptonite, Lex Luther, super powers, and the battle between good and evil--and transformed it into a tale about an introverted newspaper reporter who likes to caper about the city while wearing a red cape and tights.
Certainly, to those not familiar with the plot of Solaris, the book, the movie is (as a brief on-the-spot audience survey demonstrated), as abysmally confusing as it is meaningless. A question for director Steven Soderbergh: Do you actually think this tepid, truncated, politically-correct piece of fluff you have produced has merit? Do you realize this is on an artistic par with Battlefield Earth?Science fiction fans might be prompted to ask: How does director Soderbergh sleep at night? And the answer is, of course, very peacefully–since his dreams are probably as dull and uneventful as his version of Solaris.
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link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=6390&reviewer=214
originally posted: 12/16/02 02:29:23
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USA
27-Nov-2002 (PG-13)
UK
N/A
Australia
27-Feb-2003
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