solaris

February 28 movie: Solaris. The question I asked myself before starting this movie was, why does it exist? What did Soderbergh add to this story that was worth making the movie over? If it had been nothing more than "make Tarkovky's movie again, this time easier to follow," I would have been really annoyed.

Well, it kind of was that, the same movie with less ambiguity, but it wasn't just that. It was actually pretty interesting how the two movies tell basically the same story -- almost everything that happens is the same -- but it seems to mean something different in the Soderbergh version. It's much more about the love story here and the resolution of his relationship with his wife is quite different.

I have to give Soderbergh credit for making a thoughtful science fiction movie with few special effects (though what effects there were -- mainly the images of Solaris -- were spectacular) and almost no action, which is still engaging. And for doing a remake of a legendarily cerebral film that doesn't compromise any of the ideas in the original. In big budget Hollywood that can't be easy to do.

That said, it was a bit too explainy for my taste. There's some clunky dialogue in there, like "I don't understand what's happening. And if I do understand it, I don't think I can handle it. I'm not the person I remember." Funny, I recall the Tarkovsky version conveying all of that without the character having to exposit it all for us. It didn't go all the way to Closed Captioning for the Intelligence Impaired, but having to stop and make sure the audience is keeping up, it robs the movie of a certain ... subtlety? mystery? poetry? All that and many other -y words Tarkovsky provided in abundance.

It's not really fair to compare Soderbergh, a talented filmmaker, with Tarkovsky, a genius. But then again, it's impossible not to if he's going to remake Tarkovsky's movies. So I'll just say that if you like movies that make you think, but you avoided the original Solaris because a foreign movie almost 3 hours long in which nothing happens sounds boring, give the Soderbergh version a try. I didn't think the original Solaris was boring at all -- I was stunned, in reading a review today, to learn it was 165 minutes long, I would have guessed half that -- but I'm glad I saw this one too. I probably would be giving it an A+ review if I hadn't seen the Tarkovsky version first.