Post by The Narrator Returns on Nov 30, 2013 18:46:18 GMT -6
“And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not
And death shall have no dominion.”
- Dylan Thomas
In retrospect, it’s not hard to see why Solaris didn’t light the box office on fire, or why audiences hated it (it got a Cinemascore of F, after all). A second adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s sci-fi novel (Andrei Tarkovsky’s version was made in 1972), it was almost certainly going to attract the ire of cinephiles, who would cry that it was a Hollywood bastardization of a cinematic piece of art. And regular moviegoers would find it too similar to the original, in that it’s long, and slow, and boring, and nothing happens, and blah blah blah. To paraphrase a Simpsons quote, it was too arthouse for Hollywood, and too Hollywood for the arthouse. Plus, the trailers were unbelievably misleading. This trailer (done in the style of a sci-fi romance, a la producer James Cameron’s <i>Titanic</i>) and this trailer (done as an action-thriller, which is so far removed from the actual film that it might as well not have the same title) are so completely different in tone that you wouldn’t be stupid for thinking they were for different movies. Did this movie deserve its fate? No. In fact, I like it more than the Tarkovsky version.
George Clooney forgoes much of his movie star charm and charisma and instead plays the role of Chris Kelvin, a psychiatrist who’s mostly been in a cloud of grief since his wife (Natascha McElhone) killed herself, with the hurt eyes of a wounded animal. He gets a message from his friend (Ulrich Tukur) that he is to come over to a space station bordering the planet Solaris. The crew members have been behaving erratically, and a rescue crew sent there has disappeared. When Chris gets there, he meets Snow (Jeremy Davies, whose odd mannerisms have never been put to better use) and Gordon (Viola Davis), who only supply him with cryptic information about a strange phenomenon affecting them. When he goes to bed, he has dreams of his wife, and when he wakes up, there she is with him. At first, he sends her out into space (in what is the best and most haunting scene in the movie), but when she appears the next day, he has no idea what to do. Is he supposed to love her like he did on Earth? Or does he recognize that she’s merely a creation of Solaris, a half-thought-out memory which might even be correct? This is the heart of the whole movie; do you remember only what you want to, and live with that, or you do remember it all, good or bad? Ultimately, Chris makes the heartbreaking choice to stay with his comfortable memories, even if they are wrong.
Of course, this might be dry and dull on paper, but Soderbergh uses the Kubrickian interiors of the station quite well, and the editing (especially in the flashbacks) is top-notch. However, the film’s best asset is Cliff Martinez’s score. It’s a haunting ambient mood piece, and it complements the film so beautifully that it’s hard to imagine the film would work as well without it. All in all, it’s a shame that this film has gone so under recognized by many. It’s one of Soderbergh’s greatest films; a film so thoroughly emotional that it’s almost certain to start waterworks.
Grade: A
Lester Scale: Masterpiece
The Soderbergh Players: George Clooney made a third appearance in a Soderbergh film here, with his previous two being the leads in Out of Sight and Ocean’s Eleven. Aside from him, the only Soderbergh-regular actor is Viola Davis, who got her biggest role to date in one of his films, previously turning in small, but memorable parts in Out of Sight and Traffic.
Behind the camera, Cliff Martinez turned in his ninth score for Soderbergh (one which happens to be his best). The always-capable Peter Andrews worked on his fourth straight Soderbergh film (it’s a shame only Soderbergh seems to use him, he’s great), and for the first time of many, Mary Ann Bernard edits the picture.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not
And death shall have no dominion.”
- Dylan Thomas
In retrospect, it’s not hard to see why Solaris didn’t light the box office on fire, or why audiences hated it (it got a Cinemascore of F, after all). A second adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s sci-fi novel (Andrei Tarkovsky’s version was made in 1972), it was almost certainly going to attract the ire of cinephiles, who would cry that it was a Hollywood bastardization of a cinematic piece of art. And regular moviegoers would find it too similar to the original, in that it’s long, and slow, and boring, and nothing happens, and blah blah blah. To paraphrase a Simpsons quote, it was too arthouse for Hollywood, and too Hollywood for the arthouse. Plus, the trailers were unbelievably misleading. This trailer (done in the style of a sci-fi romance, a la producer James Cameron’s <i>Titanic</i>) and this trailer (done as an action-thriller, which is so far removed from the actual film that it might as well not have the same title) are so completely different in tone that you wouldn’t be stupid for thinking they were for different movies. Did this movie deserve its fate? No. In fact, I like it more than the Tarkovsky version.
George Clooney forgoes much of his movie star charm and charisma and instead plays the role of Chris Kelvin, a psychiatrist who’s mostly been in a cloud of grief since his wife (Natascha McElhone) killed herself, with the hurt eyes of a wounded animal. He gets a message from his friend (Ulrich Tukur) that he is to come over to a space station bordering the planet Solaris. The crew members have been behaving erratically, and a rescue crew sent there has disappeared. When Chris gets there, he meets Snow (Jeremy Davies, whose odd mannerisms have never been put to better use) and Gordon (Viola Davis), who only supply him with cryptic information about a strange phenomenon affecting them. When he goes to bed, he has dreams of his wife, and when he wakes up, there she is with him. At first, he sends her out into space (in what is the best and most haunting scene in the movie), but when she appears the next day, he has no idea what to do. Is he supposed to love her like he did on Earth? Or does he recognize that she’s merely a creation of Solaris, a half-thought-out memory which might even be correct? This is the heart of the whole movie; do you remember only what you want to, and live with that, or you do remember it all, good or bad? Ultimately, Chris makes the heartbreaking choice to stay with his comfortable memories, even if they are wrong.
Of course, this might be dry and dull on paper, but Soderbergh uses the Kubrickian interiors of the station quite well, and the editing (especially in the flashbacks) is top-notch. However, the film’s best asset is Cliff Martinez’s score. It’s a haunting ambient mood piece, and it complements the film so beautifully that it’s hard to imagine the film would work as well without it. All in all, it’s a shame that this film has gone so under recognized by many. It’s one of Soderbergh’s greatest films; a film so thoroughly emotional that it’s almost certain to start waterworks.
Grade: A
Lester Scale: Masterpiece
The Soderbergh Players: George Clooney made a third appearance in a Soderbergh film here, with his previous two being the leads in Out of Sight and Ocean’s Eleven. Aside from him, the only Soderbergh-regular actor is Viola Davis, who got her biggest role to date in one of his films, previously turning in small, but memorable parts in Out of Sight and Traffic.
Behind the camera, Cliff Martinez turned in his ninth score for Soderbergh (one which happens to be his best). The always-capable Peter Andrews worked on his fourth straight Soderbergh film (it’s a shame only Soderbergh seems to use him, he’s great), and for the first time of many, Mary Ann Bernard edits the picture.