I rented the 1972 Russian version of Solaris this weekend despite being warned that it was a total snoozefest by several people in the know. I, of course, ignored their advice because I happen to like slow moving sci-fi (2001, 2010 etc), I enjoyed reading the book and the 2002 remake is one of my favorite movies. I figured it would be right up my alley.
Boy was I wrong. I fell asleep at some point fairly early on and woke to a car driving through a city. For five minutes. I almost passed out from the boredom. In the book and 2002 movie Kris Kelvin gets to the Solaris station lickety-split, but for some reason director Tarkovsky felt it was necessary to spend a good hour on earth with characters mostly sitting in silence. Or driving through a city.
Then came the next 2 hours.
I really like the look of the environments in 2001: A Space Odyssey, for being filmed in 1968 it doesn’t come off as being that dated. Solaris is another matter entirely. I was excited to see what the Russian take on ships in space would be. What I got was nothing like the simple elegance of 2001. Solaris could have taken place in an office building in downtown Moscow and nobody would be the wiser. Except for the one hallway that was dressed entirely in diamond plate and a row of dimming lights down either side although that could easily be passed off as ‘office building entrance of THE FUTURE!’.
The one ray of sunshine in the three hours of wasted life was comparing the shots in 1972 Solaris to 2002 Solaris. Soderbergh took more than a handful of scenes, dusted them off, dressed them up and put them back on display. But I can assure you that anyone who hasn’t seen the new version as many times as I have would neither notice nor care about these meta-details.
Final Score: ZZZZ
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