SOLARIS Movie Review

Near the planet Solaris, a space station orbits as the cosmonauts inside try to understand why they've been having emotionally overwhelming visions of their earlier lives on Earth. They discover that the ocean of Solaris is actually a vast, intelligent entity that is affecting their memories and thought processes in life-changing ways. The brilliant Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky tried to borrow chapters from Stanley Kubrick and Jean-Luc Godard in this adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's novel, but the result is hampered by the movie's dirge-like pacing and its generally shoddy technical effects. (The plot isn't all that fresh, either; just as Alien was a hightech version of the 1956 It! The Terror from Beyond Space, Solaris seems an intellectualized, art house retread of Sid Pink's 1961 cheese fest Journey to the Seventh Planet.) There are exquisite sequences and unforgettable images in Solaris, but it never achieves the cumulative power of such extraordinary—and thematically similar—Tarkovsky works as Stalker, Nostalghia, or The Sacrifice. Brutally cut by almost an hour when first released in the U.S., Solaris has been restored to its original, nearly three-hour length and released on video in a widescreen, letterbox format. Grand Jury Prize, Cannes Film Festival.

NEXT STOP … 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stalker, Mother and Son

1972 167m/C RU Donatas Banionis, Natalya Bondarchuk; D: Andrei Tarkovsky; M: Eduard Artemyev. Cannes Film Festival ‘72: Grand Jury Prize. VHS, LV, Letterbox FXL, FCT