Solaris (1972) - film review

For the past decade, a space station has been orbiting Solaris, an ocean planet in a distant galaxy.  The success of the mission is under threat from an outbreak of emotional crises which are preventing the crew from carrying out their research duties.  Psychologist Kris Kelvin is sent to the space station to investigate the cause of these traumas and assess whether the project should be abandoned.   Kelvin is surprised when he learns that one member of the three-man crew has died in mysterious circumstances.  The other two crewmembers, Sartorius and Snaut, explain that they have been experiencing strange hallucinations, which appear to emanate from the surface of Solaris, as if the planet were a gigantic living brain.  Kelvin’s scepticism evaporates when he sees his wife Hari aboard the space station.  Although Hari killed herself on Earth some years ago, Kelvin can have no doubt that the woman is his wife.  Destabilised by Hari’s unexplained return, Kelvin puts her into a rocket and launches her into space.  Then Hari appears a second time...

If bewildering sci-fi psychodramas are your thing then Solaris, Andrei Tarkovsky’s sprawling exploration of the human psyche in outer space and inner worlds, is just what you’ve been looking for.  One of Russia’s leading cineastes, Tarkovsky uses the medium of cinema as no other filmmaker before or since to express an almost obsessive preoccupation with matters of an existential and metaphysical nature.  Solaris is his best-known and most accessible film, despite its ample two and half hour runtime, lethargic pace and complete lack of the kind of juvenile action sequences that have become de rigueur in the sci-fi genre.  If you want more from a science-fiction drama that just a lot of bland adolescents running about zapping unconvincing computer-generated monsters this will not disappoint.  This is sci-fi for grown-ups.

Solaris is based on the 1961 novel of the same title by the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, although there are far more differences between the film and the book than similarities.  Whereas Lem’s novel is concerned with how humans react to the world around them, in particular how they might respond to an alien encounter, Tarkovsky’s film examines man’s relationship to himself.  Lem looks outwards, towards the stars; Tarkovsky looks inwards, towards our inner soul.   If this film is to be believed,  it would appear that there are as many mysteries to be found in the heart of a man as there are wonders in the universe in which he lives.

This film has often been compared with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).  Both employ the visual and textual motifs of the classic science-fiction movie with inspired lyrical power but eschew the tawdry B-movie plot devices in favour of something far more abstract and mystifying.  These are not films that are likely to appeal to your average sci-fi enthusiast, for what they offer is not the usual tedious spectacle of special effects and action stunts but rather an experience of a richer, more spiritual nature.  Kubrick’s film can be read as an ironic celebration of the miracle of creation and the power of the human mind.  By contrast, Tarkovsky’s film, which is just as visually stunning as Kubrick’s, is an intense and provocative reflection on perhaps the greatest mystery of all, love.

Solaris invites us to speculate on what love really is, whether it is merely delusional or has any tangible reality.  Is it possible to genuinely love another human being, or is the thing we form an emotional attachment to merely an abstraction, a fabrication of our mind?   The film is moving and subtly profound, without the off-putting portentousness that invades much of Tarkovsky’s work.   With its haunting dreamlike imagery, there is an ethereal poetic quality to Solaris, and sometimes you feel as though it were filmed from an alternative dimension.  What this film offers is an altogether different kind of viewing experience to the one that most moviegoers are used to, one that is disorientating yet comforting, a life-affirming journey into weird alien vistas.  Steven Soderbergh’s expensive 2002 remake starring George Clooney is watchable but nowhere near as mind-expanding as the Russian original.

© James Travers 2010

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?