This is the second of three related blog posts about Stanisław Lem's science fiction novel
Solaris. (start
here for part 1)
I read the novel
Solaris back in 1973, but I spent decades ignoring the 1972
Solaris movie directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. I had not enjoyed the novel (my negative reaction to the novel is explained
here), so why watch the movie?
More Oscilloscopes, please!
 |
The artificial Harey tries to
learn about the dead Harey.
Kelvin has traveled across vast
interstellar distances carrying a
framed black and white photograph
of his dead wife. |
2019. I finally watched the 1972 film called
Solaris, which has enough Sci Fi content to make a half hour-long
Twilight Zone episode. I'm certainly glad I watched this movie on DVD with the fast-forward button available for frequent use. Even with all the fast-forwarding, I dozed off several times... probably to be expected for anyone who has previously read the book.
Sadly, the 1972 film seems more an art school exercise in nihilistic
angst than a science fiction movie. Maybe this film is a "
psychological thriller"? As far as I can tell, nobody
involved in the creation of this movie knew anything about science,
hence, it is a strange "science fiction" film where the scientists don't seem like
scientists and the whole neutrinos and force fields shtick exhausts its supply of liquid oxygen and falls flatly
into the foggy alien ocean of Solaris, like an old
mimoid.
 |
Lem described the newly arrived Harey
as being in a tight-fitting white dress,
so this is how I spent 50 years imagining her
first appearance at the Solaris research station.
Kelvin later tells Harey that when first
'resurrected' she looked like his wife,
but then she grew to be a new person
in his mind, a new person to love.
Background: the Solaris ocean as seen
through a portal of the research station;
right, a sprouting mimoid. |
We know the film is set in a
Hi Tek scientific research facility because there are hundreds of 1960s vintage oscilloscopes. Art 'triumphs' over science. In 1956, the film
Forbidden Planet reached theaters and I saw it on television during the approximate period of time when I read
Solaris. I could not stop myself from preferring the magnificent (but dead) aliens of
Forbidden Planet over the inscrutable alien(s) imagined by Lem.
While the cluttered sets in the 1972 film depicting the research station interior are true to Lem's novel, I had forgotten that aspect of his story. Watching the 1972 film version of
Solaris, I felt that the clutter and disarray of the research station had been hypertrophied to comic proportions. Also, I was saddened by the fact that although Lem wrote
robots into his story, no robots made it on screen in 1972. 😞
 |
| Natalya Bondarchuk as Harey |
Natalya Bondarchuk, playing the alien probe Harey ('Rheya' in the Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox translation), is a constructed version of an Earth woman. Natalya came closest to animating this lifeless film when she died... repeatedly. Since this is an "art film", we should all be able to appreciate the artistry of her wet shirt death scene. 😃 All joking to the side, I love the idea of artificial life forms that are beyond human understanding.
Solarians vs Solarists
From the perspective of the current century, it is easy for me to think of the planet Solaris as home to the remnants of an advanced civilization that has come to exist as a complex network of subnanoscopic components, capable of marvelous technological feats. Maybe the Solarians evolved as a human-like species several billion years ago, but upon contact with humans, the Solarians seem to struggle to communicate with the Solarists (those who study Solaris).
Given their super-advanced technological powers, why are the alien(s) of Solaris such hapless bumblers? I suspect that Lem was trying to create suspense and mystery, not depict a realistically-imagined alien life form. Given this weak foundation to build a Sci Fi film upon, I can't blame the Russian movie makers for what they produced in the Soviet-era film mills of Moscow.
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Berton
A movie inside a movie:
The Berton Inquisition |
The beginning of the 1972
Solaris film is not at all like the start of Lem's novel. The novel has a "cold open" in which nothing about the past life of the protagonist (Kelvin) is explained. The clueless Kelvin literally descends from the heavenly glory of the sparkling, well run Star Ship Prometheus into a living hell that is the nearly-abandoned and totally disheveled science research station on Solaris.
I can't help wondering if
Andrei Tarkovsky had some unused footage left over from an abandoned movie project, so he spliced it into his
Solaris film. The cutting room left-overs seem to have concerned a young boy and cute girl and their horse. Needless to say, I was surprised to see a horse inside a movie about the planet Solaris. Even the horse seemed to be trying to escape from its sorry fate, as if some unthinking alien director had trapped it inside a Hitchcock movie:
The Horses.
The 1972
Solaris film uses a framing device: scenes that look like Kelvin's life on Earth before and after his mission to Solaris. Near the beginning of the film, on Earth, we are "treated" to what looks like an inept Soviet-style interrogation of a Solarist (Berton), recently returned to Earth. We are told that a bureaucratic decision has been reached: the research mission on Solaris is being terminated. In Lem's novel, Berton does not get mentioned until the 4th chapter.
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| Kelvin and Harey |
The middle part of the 1972
Solaris film is devoted to Kelvin's visit to the Solaris research station when he seemingly meets his dead wife, Harey. While trying to understand this mysterious artificial copy of his wife and his haunting dreams, Kelvin struggles to retain his sanity.
"
Tarkovsky never embraced the story and its genre." (
source)
In Lem's version of Solaris, it is while Kelvin is at the research station, hovering above the planet Solaris, that he learns about "reserve pilot" Berton, a member of a past expedition to Solaris. By reading compendia of reports about the planet Solaris and sources such as the
Solarist Annual and
The Little Apocrypha, Kelvin learns about Berton's sighting of a "giant artificial child" at the surface of the Solaris ocean. A Commission of Enquiry investigated Berton's claims. The idea that Berton saw an artificial child-like automaton, created by the ocean, was dismissed as a "vision" or hallucination caused by breathing the poisonous atmosphere of Solaris. I understand why Tarkovsky wanted to turn Berton's testimony before the Commission into a live scene for the movie (rather than have Kelvin read it from a book), but I feel it would have been better to just let Kelvin view video of the Berton's testimony to the Commission while Kelvin was at the research station.
 |
| Dr. Kelvin and some Hi Tek electronics equipment. |
Technologically Expired
Although some
Solaris fans will never tire of saying that
Solaris is "
ever-relevant", Lem's story suffers from the usual temporal displacement defects, which are amplified by converting a novel to film. Lem included computers in his story; Klein makes use of the "giant computer" at the research station. However, there are no microelectronics in this Brave New World of the future. Lem's novel carefully describes the
Hi Tek™ radio room of the Solaris research station where there is a bookcase stocked with logarithm tables and a printed document that describes the orbits of the satellites that are in orbit around the planet. In 1972, computers had been used to guide spacecraft to the Moon and back, but updating the antiquated technology of Solaris for movie viewers was not a priority for Tarkovsky.
 |
| more Hi Tek equipment |
We are in the far future, in an era when people easily cruise the vast distances between the stars, but when Kline goes to the library in the Solaris research station in order to consult some references, he is frustrated by the fact that the two books he needs have already been checked out. In the 1972
Solaris movie, when Kline is packing and ready to leave Earth, he tells his father that he is taking "the film". Later, when Kline is at the Solaris research station, we get to see that Kline's precious "film" is home video of his dead wife.
Inside the Matrix
 |
Is Natascha McElhone a better Harey?
Did Kelvin dream the events of the entire movie?
Are symmetriads alien computers?
What happened to all of the poor robots who
once worked at the Solaris research station? |
At the end of the 1972
Solaris film, there is a scene in which Kelvin almost seems to have returned to Earth, but it is an Earth with defects, like a simulated Earth that contains errors. We have to wonder: was anything in this looong (almost 3 hours) tedious movie what it seemed to be? Maybe Kelvin's thoughts are completely under the control of the alien Solarians; possibly he imagined returning to Earth, but is still on Solaris. Possibly he never left Earth and only imagined being on Solaris.
No $ale (I'm not buying the ending)
I accept that becoming "trapped in the Solaris
Matrix" is a possible scenario when dealing with a technologically-advanced telepathic alien life form, but it is not the story in
the Kilmartin and Cox translation of Lem's novel that I read back in 1973.
Andrei Tarkovsky took his version of
Solaris in a direction that surprised me and strikes me as a sharp break from Lem's original story ending. I wish that Tarkovsky had made two short movies: first, one showing Lem's story and then a sequel film that went in the new direction that Tarkovsky wanted to explore.
Remaining question. How does the 2002 Steven Soderbergh-crafted
Solaris film compare to the 1972 version?
Related Viewing:
Solaris artwork
See Also
Next: the
2002 film version of Solaris
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