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Review: Solaris
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.
This is such a hopelessly short review that I have no idea what the commenter actually thought of the film. I've really been anticipating this one, too...the 1972 solaris is one of the greatest films I think I've seen. Well, can't troll too much here...at least Katz didn't write this review. ;)
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
Its sad they ruined this by turning into a love story. The movie cast away Lem's real intents. The book (as are most of Lem's) is about the lack of communication, the mystery of the mind and loss. I dont think hollywood audiences have the attention span to see all that Lem encompasses, which might make them think a bit too much, but surely they can stomach a little more than this! I would highly recommend the book.
But what is the correct way to pronounce Solaris (as in Sun's OS)? I always said the 'a' like 'hair'...but on the previews for this they said it like 'car.' Just me wondering if I've been pronouncing Solaris wrong all this time. :)
We wave the flag of freedom as we conquer and invade.
another review from Micheal thatis not only completely contradictory to the status quo but also completely off-base. I think HE is the one who didn't grasp what was going on there. The movie isn't for everyone, but if you care to be engaged by a movie in several ways (either by passively just following it, or actually trying to figure it out as you go, and see the underlying meanings and goings-on) it's certainly worth the extended 1.5 hour toture you will certainly bear with this horrid piece of trash that oh I guess isn't so bad after all and beats watching Mission to Mars.... Dude, did it suck, and was it not worth the money, or was it ok, and you should go see it? Saying "ooooh it was so boring and I nearly passed out several times, and the plot was pointless and shallow" then going "yeah but its better than most sci-fi films and you should probably maybe not oughta kinda watch it" doesn't exactly give a good reccomendation one way or the other. AHHHHH I'm just pissed tomorrow is Monday.
"The saddest words of mice and men, are not those which were, but should have been."
The invisible car thing would actually work with current technology, only using today's technology it would be far too expensive. For the same reason that large-area solar cells are too expensive. But as soon as large-area electronics becomes a reality, than you'll be able to pattern circuits onto anything. So technically it would be possible to pattern Bond's entire car with pixels. Each pixel would be comprised of a 3-layer RGB light sensor, and a active LCD pixel, or better yet, an orgranic LED. This could all be deposited on a plastic skin (which I think Bond had) or directly onto the siding of the car. The tricky part would be the software. But with some fancy software and some interpolation, it could easily be done. Even the windows of the car could have these sensors on them, and still appear transparent (or tinted, whatever). The tricky part would be the wheels. But you could just put covers over the wheels, so that part was pretty fake.
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.
Get off my launchpad!
I guess it must be hard to compete against one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.
Andrei Tarkovsky has made incredible movies that leave undeletable impressions on your mind. Here is the imdb links to Tarkovsky's Solyaris
"Well, let's see... Doctor arrives at space station orbiting planet. Strange things have happened there. People have died. Doctor finds that his once dead wife is now very much alive on this space station. Where have I heard this before? Ah yes, it was really good the first time I saw it, when it was called Event Horizon"
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
You must have missed A Wookie Christmas.
Get off my launchpad!
Those of you waiting for the /. review of Solaris need wait no longer; it's here. I can sum it up simply: it sucked. Long-time readers will, no doubt, be hopeful for a well-though-out reasoned criticism of the movie, as it is being poorly received nearly across the boards, and so the question of "why?" is no doubt hanging on the lips of /. readers, perhaps hoping for some insight from a fellow sci-fi fan.
Unfortunately, your worst fears are realized: the review in question presents a simple viewpoint: "it's slow and boring, the Bond movie sucks too because it has an invisible car in it, and other reviewers also didn't like the film, but they're still a bunch of dummies." With fast-paced critical analysis like that, who needs well-reasoned arguments?Clearly, the reviewer had something icky in his coffee this morning, or worse, skipped the coffee altogether. On the whole, the Solaris review is uninformative and grumpy, although it does at least warn the reader away from what is supposedly a pretty awful film.
No breasts. No real info. Much whining. Joe Bob says, "Ignore it and hope it goes away." One star.
yeah. the car, it's invisible
If you pay oodles for product placement, wouldn't it be nice if people could actually see the product?
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
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.
Sorry, but shouldn't this be Sun instead of News?
I got more rhymes than Jamaica got Mangoes.
Solaris is one of those movies that tries to make a deeper-meaning point, much like American Beauty did.
American Beauty made profound statements during its 122 minutes, whereas Solaris could have had a similar impact if it were 4 minutes long.
"Mother, should I run for President? Mother, should I trust the government?"
God I'm sick of that phrase. I want to beat anyone who says it to death with a blunt instrument.
:)
Anyway I disagree about the Bond film. I suppose michael loved World is Not Enough and Denise Richards as a nuclear scientist though. (Which one was really more believable?) I thought that despite how over the top it went Bond was overall a very entertaining action film. It was pure Bond and that's all I ask. Of course, I did have some grievances with the instances of slow motion, but I can't have everything I guess.
In Solaris, Kelvin's days are spent in a futile effort to understand a planet with strange characteristics and irrational features that combine logic and chaos into an alien mixture that defies human understanding.
I have largely the same feelings whenever I port software to a Sun system.
We have the technology today! Flexible LCDs are a reality. The tech used in the movie is entirely reasonable and practical: cameras shoot a picture from one side of the car and project the image on the other side.
When Q (Cleese) walked around it on that first shot, you saw his legs get huge and flash by as he walked in front of one of the cameras. That was the touch that made it beleivable.
You'd be better off making fun of some of the other stupid things in the movie, such as the entire driving-around-in-the-melting-ice-palace sequence.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
Since we already thinking along the lines of expensive (or 10 years away technology), it would be easy to have an infrared detector which would detect the prescence of a body. Assuming it's a human body, the software could use that to determine what to display, so that it looks "proper" from the persons' viewpoint.
Another problem I didn't mention in the original post is that there would be so many electrical lines on the circuit that you'd need to use polysilicon to help do some multiplexing, and stuff like that. This technology is decently advanced right now, but to make an invisible Bond car I'd say at least another 5 years.
But the cost will be enormous for 10 years at least. And no one will want it, so demand will be rock-bottom, which means even more expensive...
He's been a robot.
He's been a carrot.
And on November 27th,
Rob Schneider is: George Clooney
Watch him try to stay sane as a killer space station tries to ruin his chances of getting the girl of his dreams.
Staring the voice of Oscar-winner Dame Judy Dench as the space station.
Rated R for partial rabbit nudity and poop jokes.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
I agree the love story was distracting, but the movie was still good. I have no idea how the reviewer thought there were such long quiet pauses when 2001 had at least four times more lack of sound. I've seen both movies (and even 2010) within the past 3 days. Hey, HBO free preview weekend.
Even with the distracting love story, the end really resolves well and doesn't play too hard on the leads' relationship. I guess it should have been used more as a device.
Overall, it was a good "theme" movie (as opposed to 99.5% of movies, which fall into the "plot/action" category) along the lines of Magnolia or American Beauty. I walked away with a few interesting questions and mixed feelings.
-Vic If you can't figure out my email, then don't.
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.
I must have been the only person in the audience that liked the movie, and so what? I think this movie is one of the the greatest. It is slow on purpose: it wants to make you think about what is happening on the screen: A man has lost his wife and after being sent to space, thinks she is being returned to him in the form of a real person, not just in dreams. He is forced to choose between parting ways *again* with his wife or staying in space on the ship but possibly going mad as the situation is not as simple as it may seem: this 'new' creature might have really been sent out there to destroy him. It's a movie about death, identity, guilt, longing for a lost one. I think it's quite remarkable and I'm glad Steven Soderberg & James Cameron had the courage to take a chance by making a movie that goes so much against the usual Hollywood mold.
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.
there's no place like ~
When there is background music, it lacks the classical majesty of 2001 and is actually a bit annoying.
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.
In a recent UK documentary on the making of Die Another Day the producer of the film explained that the Invisible Vanquish was an extrusion of the idea of adaptive camoflage systems that both America and Britain are developing.
The Car in the bond film is a bit of fantasy loosely based on reality.
Adaptive Camoflage is designed to be fitted to the Reactive Armour plates on modern tanks using liquid crystal or simmilar technology. The system can be used in the case of a prepared position where the tank commander walks say 100 feet downrange prior to the tank being positioned, takes a digital photo of the position and then moves the tank into place.
The picture is then used to 'paint' the plates on the vehicle to resemble the area the vehicle was moved into so an enemy unit approaching from a distance will find it hard to visually aquire the tank.
This system can also be used to 'best-guess' the colours required when stopping in the battlefield (albeit without jumping out for the snapshot). For example; a tank could stop half in front of a building and hedge and be 'painted' in the colours of the building & hedge.
This only works against an enemy unit approaching from one direction and even then would only work from several hundred meters away (unless the enemy approached in a straight line directly toward the tank).
This system will likely be implemented and refined over time but a vehicle which could appear 'invisible' under close inspection is rather far-fetched and something very much based in Science-Fiction
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
I must respectfully disagree with Michael on this one.
James Bond films have always reflected the times in which they were made, for better (1960's) or worse (1970s-80s).
Right now, an invisible car is just what you'd expect from a Bond picture, IMHO.
If we needed a reason to dislike DAD, look no further than the TERRIBLE visual effects.
I'd like to jump her shark ....
XML causes global warming.
- James Bond films don't need reviewing. Everyone knows exactly what they're going to get
... explosions, nasty baddies, Bond being cool, gadgets and girls.
What you say ?40 years of cinematic history down the toilet in favor of bright flashes and loud bangs. Since XXX is a Bond wannabe, that makes Die Another Day a second generation knock-off. What's missing from this movie? Any real sense that we're watching 007 rather than a generic spy in a tuxedo.
For Die Another Day, some elements of the Bond formula are intact: the cool gadgets (including an invisible car, a glass-shattering ring, and an ice speeder), the attractive women (although, at least in the case of Jinx, she's more of a partner/rival than a mere love interest), the globe-trotting (from North Korea to Hong Kong to Havana to London to Iceland), and the martinis (shaken, not stirred). The villain, Graves, and his henchman, Zao, are unmemorable, and their inevitable comeuppances are hardly the kind of moments to get audiences cheering.
The opening theme is dreadful. It's a Madonna pop tune, not a Bond song, and its lack of musical consistency strikes a dissonant chord. (And, as "payment" for providing such an awful piece of music, Madonna gets to "act" in a cameo, which, unfortunately, allows her to speak a few lines of dialogue.) David Arnold's score, which makes liberal use of the "James Bond Theme," seems okay, although most of it is drowned out by the explosions.
Director Lee Tamahori (Once Were Warriors, The Edge) may be to blame. Even though this anniversary movie supposedly contains something from each of the previous 19 outings (many of which appear as props in Q's lab), one gets the sense that Tamahori either doesn't understand Bond or has miscalculated the nature of his appeal. It's not enough to throw all of the Bond elements together and hope that they somehow work. A little more precision and craftsmanship are necessary (and a better script wouldn't have hurt things). Let's hope this represents an aberrance, not a trend.
If there's one thing to recognize, it's that a single bad outing will not succeed where Blofeld and dozens of other maniacs have failed. Whether played by Pierce Brosnan or someone else, James Bond will return. Let's just hope that when he does, he's the 007 we have come to love and admire, not the impostor that inhabits Die Another Day.
© 2002 James Berardinelli
Bad Things:
Overall: 5/10 Watch it when you are in the mood for a SLOW thinker flick.
nuclear presidential echelon assassination encryption virulent strain
Whizzmo
I liked it a lot. I think it's totally worth watching, for fans of complex movies from all genres. It has a number of shortcomings, and you might not decide that it's a great movie, but it's worth seeing just to watch where they fail.
There are a number of aspects that are absolutely fantastic. The exposition is very very well done. Stanislaw Lem fans, Soderberg fans, and hell, even Clooney fans will be happy with the exposition, even though it's the slowest part of the movie. That's my biggest confusion w/ this review - the slow parts were the best parts of the movie. I almost wished they just skipped the plot. Clooney 'n' the scientists' acting were so excellent that I wish they just played with character all movie long.
The whole movie deviates from the novel in big ways. In the beginning, Lem fans will accept those changes, because they were good decisions. The end, unfortunately, is full of bad decisions.
The end of the movie was very disappointing for me. I'm not the kind of person that feels a movie needs some Usual Suspects style reversal in order to be interesting or witty. If it's well orchestrated, and the movie is lightweight in the first place, then it can be nice. Here, it felt cheap. I wanted a hard answer. They didn't deliver. Still, scenes like Clooney sitting in the library leaving a message to coordinate a meeting... that made it all worth while.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
I can understand to have a duplicate here and there, or to have a story posted a few days after it was first posted, nobody is perfect, but posting a dupe with only two stories in between the original and the dupe, what are the editors thinking???
;)
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
OK, I'll forgo modding other comments in this article to reply...
by far the most effective use of sound for a horror movie that I've ever experienced
And to stay vaguely on-topic, I can't imagine any film of Solaris getting within the same *universe* as Tarkovsky's original, let alone touching it. Although I do remember despairing when the University sci-fi society showed it, and just fast forwarded through the 'boring bits' of it. Aarrghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...
- Oliver
The right to bear arms is only slightly less stupid than the right to arm bears...
I watched this movie, I read the book a few times, I saw the Russian version a couple of times as well. My sig. says it all.
:)
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
You can't handle the truth.
The next movie in SOLARIS sequel will be: CmdrTaco installing Sun Solaris to run /.
The first 2 hours of the movie we'll see Rob looking at the installation progress bar and second 2 hours we'll experience the thrill of the configuration manager.
You can't handle the truth.
I'd especially like to know if the car ride from Solyaris where you see a car driving through tunnels for 10 minutes without anything happening.
I'm afraid, timing standards of an average sci-fi flick don't apply to Tarkovsky.
Then, in 1972 (especially for a Russian viewer), this probably could express dehumanization and solitude of the technological world. It's kind of ironic that seeing a car driving through an endless urbanistic maze makes an average modern viewer think "hey, nothing worth mentioning is going there".
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Hey, I thought Die Another Day was a very respectable addition to the Bond franchise. I enjoyed it and may go see it again. Pierce does a great job as Bond, not as good as Sean The Ultimate, but much better than the rest of the pack of wanna-bes. The plot, the locales, the bad guys, the set pieces, the girls - all great. A little weak on the gizmos, too much reliance on just the invisible car to cover the gizmo angle, but hey, that was cool too. The sword fight and the fight on the jet as it's falling apart were especially good. Maybe I was enjoying the popcorn too much and not thinking it through as the movie unfolded, but I was actually surprised by the resolution of the traitor angle as well as the true ID of the main bad guy, so I gotta say there was a pretty good surprise factor in it for me, too. Nice to see Bond behind the power curve and on his own for a while, too - that was actually the one angle of Bond that Timothy did well in one of his films. They're trying to set Halley up with her own franchise as Jinx and considering how commercial and crass such a thing COULD have been, they did a pretty good job of that too. Overall, I give DAD an 8 out of 10. If ytou haven't seen it, you should.
- short answer answer.
..... but wait, I am not going to tell you. Read the book.
Long answer - Kelvin is sent to a station (not a space station, but rather a station that float above the planet named Solaris by using antigravity... Now, he enters the station where there supposed to be 3 people. Finds one of them who talks all crazy and tells Kelvin to wait a little to understand what is going on. Apparently one of the 3 people is dead (suicide). Kelvin waits, reads notes etc. goes to sleep, wakes up and sees his long dead wife (10 years ago commited suicide because of Kelvin leaving her...) He is scared, tries to escape her, she goes through a steel plate not to be left behind, and, oh, btw., her wounds heal very quickly. He jettisons her into an orbit in a small rocket (which she almost dismantles before it leaves the station.) Now, he thinks he's crazy and with some complicated scientific calculations proves to himself that he is not. It is all about Solaris - a planet covered with some bio-mass ocean that can be anything and is very powerfull (for example it stabilizes its own planet's orbit in a binary star system.) The ocean apparently is studying people or maybe just toing with them, in any case we do not know what it is doing, if it means to do it or if it just happens to do it without even realizing anything.
Kelvin's dead wife comes back the next morning (binary star system btw.) So he tries to approach this logically but remembers his love to her and doesn't know what to think to do whatever. Another scientist on the station finds out how to destabilize the field that holds neutrinoes that the clones are made of, and by doing so how to destroy the clones. Anyway, at the end
You can't handle the truth.
I just came home from watching Solaris, and here's what I have to say about it.
To me, it seemed like the kind of movie that humanity will appreiciate more a long time from now, when we're much more mature as a race. This movie is deep, it stimulates us to think about what we really are as humans. Most of the people I know aren't used to anything beyond the depth of "Die Another Day." Maybe that's why the reviewer mentioned that movie as a contrast. There's some deep intellectual stuff going on in this movie, and all the quiet times are there for the viewer to reflect and think.
If you're not used to thinking, then this movie definately will suck for you. I thought it was well worth the price. Go, make up your own mind, and if it sucks for you, ask for your money back. They'll usually give it.
(my $0.03 CDN)
I dont think hollywood audiences have the attention span to see all that Lem encompasses, which might make them think a bit too much, but surely they can stomach a little more than this!
You're wrong.
During the screening I went to, dozens of people walked out. More than one person said "That Sucked" right at the end. I didn't hear anyone say anything good about it.
I thought it was good, but it wasn't nearly as complete as I had hoped (as, I think you're saying).
.sig last updated Jan. 14, 2000
What was the deal with the door knob?
It establishes Chris and Rhea's relationship. The first thing he noticed about her wasn't that she was a pretty girl, but that she was carrying, of all things, a doorknob. This demonstrates that their relationship will be unconventional.
What was the physicist-girl's creation that kept knocking around in her room?
That's not important to the story, so it was deliberately left to your imagination. Note, also, her line, "I never get used to these... resurrections." She's definitely got some serious issues.
Why did Chris' wife always have this creepy-ish plastic grin through the first half of the movie?
Because she's flirting with Chris. Women-- and men, for that matter-- who are attracted to you often smile for no apparent reason. It's possible that you might not be aware of this if you've never seen it in real life.
What the hell happened to the security detail that was sent in before Chris got there?
They disappeared.
The guy that was there said the security detail got there and killed one guy, but... where did the security detail go after that??
They disappeared. Any more time spent wondering about this will be classified under "missing the point."
And what about the guy they said just disappeared? that he simply wasn't on the ship anymore? what happened to him?
He also disappeared. This is what I meant by "missing the point."
I write in my journal
Yes, Seth, you did.
Event Horison was a fun movie, which tried to touch on the themes Solaris covers; fear, loss, lack of communication, regret, and perception versus reality. The science is hokey but Solaris was no better and Event Horizon moved at a good pace, had plenty of great lines and excellent effects. How could you forget other lines like, "You don't need eyes to see where we are going."? Awsome. To make things really good, it had gotten dark, and the sky was full of heat lightning when we came out. God has the best shows.
Please do rent Event Horizon and record the lines you like and post them.
In any case, I expect great things from Sodenberg. His insight is penetrating and he's not afraid to amuse his audience with it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
To call Solaris disappointing would be an understatement. The truth is, the movie is awful. Lem's novel had a science fiction emphasis that revolved around a living "sentient ocean" on the planet Solaris. The focus was on how man would react to a nonanthropomorphic being whose nature and behavior man was unable to comprehend. A romantic (slightly) subplot served the main plot by illustrating a facet of the ocean's behavior-the planet's own reaction to humans that it, in turn, was unable to comprehend.
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.
God I'm sick of that phrase.
So what you're saying is, "Jumped the Shark" has itself Jumped the Shark?
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Bond = McDonald's
Solaris = pricey ethnic restaurant you've never tried
Yeah, it's easy to see which one works for you.