Am I that simple-minded or does "Solaris" just suck?
SPOILERS, AHOY!
Saw the movie tonight and went in knowing this was an artistic sort of Sci-fi.
That said-WTF?
I HATE it when movies are unresolved, or 'leave it up to the viewer to draw their own conclusions."
IMO, this was the worst example of that sort of film. There was a love story I wasn't really touched by, a planet (?) that seemed to be it's own living entity with the ability to read minds and create it's own humans from memories, a person who's "visitor" we never got to see, and an ending that leaves you wondering what reality the protagonist is left in.
And on top of all that, it was just boring in general!
I guess the point may be to make you ask these questions and just think in general, but I don't really care what the answers are, I'm just not happy having wasted $15 and an hour and a half of my life having them put in my head.
Sometimes I wonder if highly respected artists sometimes decide to put a bunch of meaningless crap out there and watch intellectual types line up to say "I TOTALLY got that."
Jeff
Saw the movie tonight and went in knowing this was an artistic sort of Sci-fi.
That said-WTF?
I HATE it when movies are unresolved, or 'leave it up to the viewer to draw their own conclusions."
IMO, this was the worst example of that sort of film. There was a love story I wasn't really touched by, a planet (?) that seemed to be it's own living entity with the ability to read minds and create it's own humans from memories, a person who's "visitor" we never got to see, and an ending that leaves you wondering what reality the protagonist is left in.
And on top of all that, it was just boring in general!
I guess the point may be to make you ask these questions and just think in general, but I don't really care what the answers are, I'm just not happy having wasted $15 and an hour and a half of my life having them put in my head.
Sometimes I wonder if highly respected artists sometimes decide to put a bunch of meaningless crap out there and watch intellectual types line up to say "I TOTALLY got that."
Jeff
Comments
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Actually, now that I think about it, I remember an interview where John Lennon pretty much admitted that's all "I Am The Walrus" was.
But at least we got a catchy tune out of that!
Jeff
The second half was better, it tried to be kind of Stanley Kubrickish but didn't make it.
So, Hollywood again steals another idea and makes it worse. And isn't that ironic that it's Steven Soderbergh...the man who took an English mini series and made a Academy Award winning take off of that...ironic...
The entire audience here in P-town hated the flm.
I thought it was moving and powerfull, though a touch too stylish.
Its a poetic tale about a huge mind that reads and emenates our deeper unconsciouse desires and memories. To lay out the blunt, explicit meaning.
The movie lays out enormous questions: running the gammut from what is consciousness?, what is being? how and when do you say that another consciousness is real?, are our memories of people in any way adequate to the reality of otherness? are our memories which constitute our experience adequate to experience? to the real world at all? etc
it also is a metaphore for different levels of human being: from unconsciouse to consciouse to being with Being in that darn Heideggerian sense.
You should sit through the Andry Tarkovsky version.
In that version the emenations are not all nice memories and the ending is not so obviously a good-feeling religious metaphor. Tarkovskies ending is visceral and very enigmatic. The problem with the Russian version, if it can be said to be a problem, is that he didn't take his movie down a level to please an audience, so he doesn't spell it all out in a series of conversations as does Soderbergh . . . Allthough I think these scenes were important to the whole take: the dinner conversation, the two lovers talking; she mentions having to converse to her mother through psudonyms and letters . . .while Clooney only thinks about himself . . . etc . .
My problem with the American version is that it is too beautiful. Why did he use George Clooney and that beautifull actress? (I guess she looks like the actress in the Russian version) but anyway, he made this movie as if it was supposed to appeal to the people that came to see Clooney's butt . . . but clearly, a story like this is not going to appeal to people who want explosions or nakedness. . .
its where entertainment turns into something other than just going to be entertained (finally Soderbergh makes me think that he has some real artistic sensibility instead of just faking it) And since he is striving for that then why package it in the wraps of Hollywood style?
Anyway I was glad to see that Soderbergh actually dared to alienate an audience instead of merely pander to a Hollywood idea of 'Art film' even if there still is some pandering going on
Great musical and sound score!!
No, Solaris does not suck, definitively not.
and perhaps, when it comes to watching film (as opposed to moovees), you are si.............?!?!
[ 12-02-2002: Message edited by: pfflam ]</p>
and perhaps, when it comes to watching film (as opposed to moovees), you are si.............?!?! <hr></blockquote>
I'm glad some people liked it. I'm more than willing to admit I'm a rube about some things.
But, I will say this:
[quote]running the gammut from what is consciousness?, what is being? how and when do you say that another consciousness is real?, are our memories of people in any way adequate to the reality of otherness? are our memories which constitute our experience adequate to experience? to the real world at all?<hr></blockquote>
I loved Vanilla Sky. To me it brought up a lot of the same sort of issues you mention here, but in a way that kept me entertained, and with a satisfying ending that resolved the plot in a clever way.
Solaris kept me lost as to what was happening in much the same way VS did, but never let me in on the secret. It played to me like a whodunnit where you never find out who.
Maybe I'm too conditioned to the "beginning, middle, and end" formula of storytelling?
Jeff
[ 12-02-2002: Message edited by: jeffyboy ]</p>
I think you can get a good idea what someone will like if they post in AO a lot, and I'd be surprised if this was your cup of tea.
Just a guess, though.
Jeff
<strong>...they cut out all but maybe 50 pages of the book and only put in the "happy" parts, leaving the story incomplete and meaningless...</strong><hr></blockquote>
Has Hollywood ever done better?
As for Solaris . . I think it helps not to think about how it relates to the book but rather how it relates to the other movie . . . it seemed to me that they were specically working with tha as a point of departure.
But yeah, leave it to Americans to take all the 'unhappy' or hard to take emotional aspects out of a movie . . and make it about a fantasy land of absolute 'forgivenness'.
<strong>So how is it different from Sphere? (yet another good book that didn't quite work as a movie IMHO)</strong><hr></blockquote>
completely different. sphere is incredible compared to the terrible attempt at a movie that was solaris...