OFF: Misc. ranting...

[M Holmes]

Nick Medford writes:

> Solaris was made by Andrei Tarkovsky, a truly great director IMHO, but I
> wouldn't say it was one of his best films. If you've never seen a Tarkovsky
> film, it's worth knowing that they tend to be a) very long and b) very
> slow.

> At best they are like celluloid meditations, at worst they lapse into
> serious tedium. Solaris has a particularly celebrated/notorious sequence,
> early on in the movie, where the central character is driving through a
> system of road tunnels (we're still on Earth at this point) and there is
> something like ten uninterrupted minutes of tracking shots of the tunnel
> walls flashing past. This actually looks great, but certainly goes on for
> long enough to make viewers a little restless. However there are people who
> rate Solaris as one of the greatest films ever made. Its reputation was
> probably hurt somewhat by being tagged as the "Soviet answer to 2001" by
> some sections of the press, and the two were compared in a sort of head-to-
> head way in some reviews at the time. I haven't seen the Cloonified remake,
> but I imagine it would be much more in keeping with the conventions of big
> budget cinema.

The whole first hour is set in Soviet Russia and is more than averagely
tedious.  People will hate me for saying (like I care about that eh?)
that I really liked the Clooney version.  I thought they covered the
questions of identity and reality fairly well, and I thought the planet
itself was very well portrayed.  I'd have liked to see the move take
things a little further by looking at the question of whether it was an
attempt at communication, an attack or whatever, but overall I thought
it very well done.


> Tarkovsky made another film, "Stalker", which could loosely be described as
> sci-fi, and I much prefer that to Solaris. It has a total cast of about
> four people IIRC, and features a long journey through a mysterious "zone"
> in the wake of some kind of catastrophe. The deeper themes are quite
> similar to Solaris, in that travel through a strange realm or space becomes
> a metaphor for the acquisition of self-knowledge.

Based on an extremely interesting SF novel, "Roadside Picnic" by Boris
Strugatsky. The "catastophe" to which you refer was basically a UFO
stopping by for a picnic. The weird shit that happens afterwards is, in
the concept of the writer, just a result of the picnic leaving some
trash behind. Think of it as "The Gods Must Be Crazy" in reverse, where
we are picking up the aliens Coke Cans and wondering "what the fuck is
this and what does it do?" Part of it is that anyone who leaves "The
Zone" will cause million to one accidents, and that shit deep into the
Zone can instantly turn you inside out, or worse. The "Stalkers" are
just people who've learned to navigate the Zone, and since they can't
make a living elsewhere (see above) they take tourists into it to look
for Good Stuff and try not to get turned from innies to outies.

All in all, the movie missed several interesting themes from the book,
and I'm heartened to hear that another attempt may soon be made.

FoFP