BP’s Top 100 Movie List Challenge #91: Solaris, by Sarah Brinks
I decided to undertake a movie challenge in 2017. This seemed like a good way to see some classic movies that I have tragically never seen. The Battleship Pretension Top 100 list has a good number of films I hadn’t seen before so it is a good source for my challenge.
One of my favorite genres of film is science fiction. I was raised on Star Trek and Star Wars. So Solaris was one of the films on the Battleship Pretension Top 100 list that I was the most excited to finally see. I wasn’t daunted by its nearly three hour run time until I started watching it. The first word that came to mind after finishing the film was: slog. It felt like a chore to get through and I had really force myself to finish it.
I do want to start with some positive things about the film. I like that it doesn’t expend much effort or time to spoon feed you the plot, it expects you to pay attention and catch up. The film also asks some really interesting questions about consciousness, humanity, and love. None of the questions are really answered and that is ok. The film forces you to think about what humanity means to you and what you would do for love, or even what consciousness truly means. If we imagine a red ball and we can touch it and bounce it and others can touch it, is it real or is it just your imagination. Those are all really interesting questions to ask and I like that the film raises them in different ways.
On to what I didn’t like about the film; the biggest problem that I had was that there was nothing in the film for me to latch on to. Dr. Kelvin is mopey and silent from the beginning so I was never able to care about him or what was happening to him. Unfortunately he is the only character we really get to know so it left me adrift for 165 minutes. The pacing is also a big problem for me. I know that long, meditative shots are a hallmark of Andrei Tartovsky films but it felt so dull and uninteresting to me. I appreciate a film that gives me time think or catch up but this was too much. Instead of contemplating the themes of the film I found myself bored and irritated.
This is a personal hang up, but one of the things that I could not get past was that they were clearly on a science station on a foreign planet but yet there appeared to be no science happening there. I kept asking myself why the government would keep paying to send scientists up there if they were producing no results. I know that is not the point of the film but I really couldn’t get past it and it added to my frustration with the film.
Ultimately I was really disappointed in Solaris but I am not sorry that I watched it. I see how this influenced many of the science fiction films that I love and I think it asks its audiences some interesting questions but I don’t ever want to sit through it again. It’s hard for me to judge if I believe it belong on the Battleship Pretension Top 100 list because I think it has significance as part of film history but I personally didn’t like it.
I’ve decided to rate each film using an arbitrary scale based on the board game Battleship (lowest: Destroyer, Submarine, Cruiser, Battleship, highest: Carrier)
Solaris ranking: Destroyer
I’m with you (and Jim Rohner) on this film. I guess with science fiction I have different expectations, so it doesn’t work as well as Andrei Rublev or Ivan’s Childhood for me.
If I recall correctly, the question of whether the government should keep funding “Solaristics” actually comes up.
I am sorry you didn’t get it. Reviewing this film, or rating it on Rottem Tomatoes, or whatever– that is missing the point isn’t it? Would you put the Mona Lisa on Rotten Tomatoes? “Didn’t do much for me, she isn’t even really smiling…3 stars…” Rating movies is for Steven Soderburgh, or George Clooney– someone who makes movies and cares about the red carpet and getting an Oscar. That isn’t this film. This comes from a time and a place where people thought that film might be Art, with a capital ‘A.’ Where you were going to change your whole frame of reference and walk out of that viewing thinking questions you knew you had no answer for. I felt stunned by Tarkovsky’s Solaris. I felt like it put me into a meditative state like doing yoga for 3 hours, like I was forced to step outside the normal flow of my conscious mind and inhabit an entirely different, very contemplative place. It still is, to me, one of the deeper film experiences I have ever had, and in fact deeper than I would have thought film could be.
In graduate school I had a prof play us a video of a dead cow’s head being swarmed by flies in the desert sun. This video she shot, we watched it for probably 40 minutes, doing nothing else, in the middle of the day in a classroom in busy downtown Manhattan. If you let yourself go, and stop thinking about what you need to do and where you need to be, there is an entirely different state of awareness. It is worth the pursuit. Film is so immersive that it can be a truly transportive art form. Tarkovsky did this better than any filmmaker I can think of: he dropped you in this empty space and tried your patience. He left you alone with yourself. If you have the patience it is so worth it.