Steven Soderberg, 2003
Reparto: George Clooney (Chris Kelvin), Natascha McElhone (Rheya Kelvin), Jeremy Davies (Snow), Viola Davis (Helen Gordon), Ulrich Tukur (Gibarian), Morgan Rusler (Emisario), John Cho (Emisario), Shane Skelton (Hijo de Gibarian), Donna Kimball (Mujer de Gibarian), Michael Ensign (Amigo), Elpidia Carrillo (Amiga), Kent Faulcon (Amigo), Lauren Cohn (Amiga).
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And death shall have no dominionReparto: George Clooney (Chris Kelvin), Natascha McElhone (Rheya Kelvin), Jeremy Davies (Snow), Viola Davis (Helen Gordon), Ulrich Tukur (Gibarian), Morgan Rusler (Emisario), John Cho (Emisario), Shane Skelton (Hijo de Gibarian), Donna Kimball (Mujer de Gibarian), Michael Ensign (Amigo), Elpidia Carrillo (Amiga), Kent Faulcon (Amigo), Lauren Cohn (Amiga).
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Estoy un poco cansado de oir que el valor de una cinta se debe a su profundidad o a su valor filosófico. Por muy válido que sea un planteamiento filosófico, puede convertirse en un monumento solemne al aburrimiento si el director no se entera de que la cámara no es la forma de expresarlo. Y una paradoja sencilla puede tener mucho valor cinematográfico si un director con sentido de lo que es cine la explota bien. El éxito al pasar a cine una buena idea lo decidirá cada cual según se lo haya pasado, y personalmente Solaris me parece un fiasco, porque aunque dos ideas me reverbera interminablemente con su belleza, el ritmo es catatónico y el mejor lugar para expresarlas no era la pantalla.
La primera idea la redactó Borges en Tlön, Uqbar Orbis Tertius. Este mundo pensado por una secta secreta tiene una naturaleza parecida a Solaris. La esencia de las cosas es psicológica, de modo que un hombre pierde una moneda, lo cuenta a varios amigos y al cabo del tiempo el vuelve a encontrarla, uno de los amigos pasa por el lugar y también encuentra la moneda. Esa moneda puede multiplicarse porque muchos saben de ella. A las copias de un objeto real, que tienen una naturaleza imperfecta, se les llama hrönir (singular: hrön). Rheya es la esposa muerta del protagonista, Rheya es un Hrön. Por eso hay dos.
El psiquiatra Kelvin crea a su esposa Rheya en una nave espacial lejana cuando sueña con ella. Aquí en la tierra ella se suicidó por culpa de él. Luego fue enviado a una misión en el planeta Solaris donde unos astronautas se niegan a volver por una causa desconocida. Cuanto entra en la estación espacial sólo quedan dos con vida, y un niño que creo una de las víctima. Los dos astronautas supervivientes crearon seres que les ataron a Solaris y los dos los destruyeron porque la naturaleza real de esas creaciones puede ser un peligro para la especie. Pero el doctor Kelvin no quiere destruir a su esposa.
Lo más inquietante de este planteamiento es la naturaleza de las copias que los personajes de Solaris sueñan. Estas creaciones cobran forma real y se comunican con las demás personas. No son fantasmas. Pero están creados por los recuerdos de los personajes. Rheya, la esposa de Kelvin es la mujer que Kelvin piensa, la mujer que él recuerda. Por eso ella se asusta de sí misma, porque su pasado esta lleno de huecos y de imprecisiones. Ella ignora todo lo que Kelvin no sabe de ella, porque ella es la creación de Kelvin. La cuestión es, ¿Acaso no tenemos una idea incompleta de todas las personas que tratamos? ¿acaso no es falsa? Kelvin ama a Rheya, Kelvin necesita que siga existiendo. ¿Pero es a Rheya a quien ama o a su propia idea de Rheya?
El poema que tanto cita Kelvin se llama “And death shall have no dominion”. El amor habrá triunfado sobre la muerte. Pero quizá Soderberg no es consciente de que ese amor eterno se convierte por medio de su paradoja en el amor derrotado. Porque Rheya descubre, igual que Jean Baptiste Grenouille en “El perfume” que lo que es amado de ella es una impresión, o un recuerdo (“soy suicida porque tú me recuerdas suicida”), pero no su esencia.
Mr Cranky (-5/-5)
It's the cinematic equivalent of getting a lecture from your parents about the nature of life.
As I was walking out of the theater, two girls behind me were cackling that "Solaris" was the worst movie they had ever seen. They derided its slowness and lack of dialogue. "Say something. Say anything!" they howled. If not for a brief glimpse of George Clooney's ass, which they also derided as "lacking roundness" and "grotesquely hairy," but maintaining a certain "aesthetic quality," the two girls commented they would have committed suicide.
While I do not often find myself sympathizing with teenage girls, I must concur, except on the points regarding George Clooney's ass, which was "firm yet subtle." Director Steven Soderbergh has made a film with about as much excitement as a turtle race. The only thing I was thankful for is that Soderbergh's version is about half as long as the original 1972 Tarkovsky version. Apparently, this was the lesson Soderbergh learned from watching the original: Keep it bad, but make it shorter. Nice job! I'm sure Hollywood executives are ready to let you remake any one of a number of other long-winded Russian space operas.
Clooney plays a psychiatrist named Chris Kelvin. After finding out that strange things are happening on a space station near Solaris, he heads off to see what's wrong. What he finds are two freaked-out people, Snow (Jeremy Davies) and Gordon (Viola Davis), and a couple of other crew members who are dead. Soon, Kelvin is waking up to his dead wife, Rheya (Natascha McElhone), and he's discovered the big secret: Solaris is somehow able to create replicas of dead human beings who held major importance for those aboard the station.
This film is essentially a meditation on the curious nature of memory. And when I use the word meditation, I'm being very accurate. You sit there, look around, and wonder why everyone is catatonic and how long it's going to be before you can get the hell out of there and do something else. "Solaris" is seriously slow. Soderbergh seems fascinated by things like rain hitting a window and light shining onto a floor. Minutes go by between sentences. Frankly, if I wanted to immerse myself into some kind of nihilist freak show, or discuss the nature of theology, I'd enroll in a freshman philosophy course where I could listen to all the 18-year-olds babble incessantly about what it is they think they know about the world.
That "Solaris" is a wide release ought to be a major embarrassment to the studio since this is clearly a film that belongs in an arthouse theater where all the pompous twits who like to sit through such drivel can go and have themselves a fine old time. Anybody who goes to this film at the local multiplex expecting to be entertained will be in for the shock of their life. It's the cinematic equivalent of getting a lecture from your parents about the nature of life.
Criticalia. Enrique Colmena (2/5)
Con un tono solemne que con demasiada frecuencia se transforma en tedio para el espectador, con planos tal vez excesivamente morosos que dificultan el seguimiento de una historia ya de por sí compleja, este "Solaris" no rehuye el tono adulto, consustancial a la ciencia ficción moderna desde "2001: Una Odisea del Espacio" (a la que, por cierto, homenajea en las bellísimas secuencias de las naves con forma de gigantescas ruedas giratorias) y "Blade Runner" (con un final que recuerda al de la obra maestra de Ridley Scott), e incluso se permite ofrecer una variante visual del fresco de la Creación del Hombre, de Miguel Ángel, clave final de una película irregular, a ratos fascinante, pero que se queda corta en su capacidad de transmitir y larga en sus desmedidas ambiciones.
Roger Ebert. Chicago Sun Times. (3.5/5)
Solaris" tells the story of a planet that reads minds, and obliges its visitors by devising and providing people they have lost, and miss. The Catch-22 is that the planet knows no more than its visitors know about these absent people. As the film opens, two astronauts have died in a space station circling the planet, and the survivors have sent back alarming messages. A psychiatrist named Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) is sent to the station, and when he awakens after his first night on board, his wife, Rheya (Natascha McElhone), is in bed with him. Some time earlier on earth, she had committed suicide.
In other words, Kelvin gets back not his dead wife, but a being who incorporates all he knows about his dead wife, and nothing else, and starts over from there. She has no secrets because he did not know her secrets. If she is suicidal, it is because he thought she was. The deep irony here is that all of our relationships in the real world are exactly like that, even without the benefit of Solaris. We do not know the actual other person. What we know is the sum of everything we think we know about them. Even empathy is perhaps of no use; we think it helps us understand how other people feel, but maybe it only tells us how we would feel, if we were them.
At a time when many American movies pump up every fugitive emotion into a clanging assault on the audience, Soderbergh's "Solaris" is quiet and introspective. There are some shocks and surprises, but this is not "Alien." It is a workshop for a discussion of human identity. It considers not only how we relate to others, but how we relate to our ideas of others--so that a completely phony, non-human replica of a dead wife can inspire the same feelings that the wife herself once did. That is a peculiarity of humans: We feel the same emotions for our ideas as we do for the real world, which is why we can cry while reading a book, or fall in love with movie stars. Our idea of humanity bewitches us, while humanity itself stays safely sealed away into its billions of separate containers, or "people."
Mercury News. Glen Lovell. (3/4)
But who's really alive? Kevin or Rheya? And if Rheya is real, what does this say about ``reality''? And if the line between the sentient and the imagined can be controlled by some intergalactic force (Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke imagined a black slab and stargate), what does this portend for physics and theology?
If your eyes are beginning to cross and your temples throb, don't despair -- you're not alone in your confusion. ``Solaris'' is meant as cinematic conundrum, a riddle wrapped in a mystery and all that. It reminds us that nothing in the universe is fully knowable. If that troubles you, this movie will trouble you. If that somehow reassures, like the notion of death as the ultimate dream state, then prepare yourself for the ultimate religious ``voyage.''
Newsday.com. John Anderson. (4/4)
"Solaris" ought to be accompanied by its own injunction: No one should enter if they've never been in love.
"Solaris" is a return to what sci-fi was meant to be: Not a way to titillate teenage boys, but a means of finding a context for complex human issues.
Much of "Solaris" is flashback, and in it we see that Rheya had an abortion and Kelvin leaves her only to return and discover that she killed herself.
Kelvin holds no dominion - to paraphrase the Dylan Thomas poem so prominent in the film - over sanity, or sense.
It's the cinematic equivalent of getting a lecture from your parents about the nature of life.
As I was walking out of the theater, two girls behind me were cackling that "Solaris" was the worst movie they had ever seen. They derided its slowness and lack of dialogue. "Say something. Say anything!" they howled. If not for a brief glimpse of George Clooney's ass, which they also derided as "lacking roundness" and "grotesquely hairy," but maintaining a certain "aesthetic quality," the two girls commented they would have committed suicide.
While I do not often find myself sympathizing with teenage girls, I must concur, except on the points regarding George Clooney's ass, which was "firm yet subtle." Director Steven Soderbergh has made a film with about as much excitement as a turtle race. The only thing I was thankful for is that Soderbergh's version is about half as long as the original 1972 Tarkovsky version. Apparently, this was the lesson Soderbergh learned from watching the original: Keep it bad, but make it shorter. Nice job! I'm sure Hollywood executives are ready to let you remake any one of a number of other long-winded Russian space operas.
Clooney plays a psychiatrist named Chris Kelvin. After finding out that strange things are happening on a space station near Solaris, he heads off to see what's wrong. What he finds are two freaked-out people, Snow (Jeremy Davies) and Gordon (Viola Davis), and a couple of other crew members who are dead. Soon, Kelvin is waking up to his dead wife, Rheya (Natascha McElhone), and he's discovered the big secret: Solaris is somehow able to create replicas of dead human beings who held major importance for those aboard the station.
This film is essentially a meditation on the curious nature of memory. And when I use the word meditation, I'm being very accurate. You sit there, look around, and wonder why everyone is catatonic and how long it's going to be before you can get the hell out of there and do something else. "Solaris" is seriously slow. Soderbergh seems fascinated by things like rain hitting a window and light shining onto a floor. Minutes go by between sentences. Frankly, if I wanted to immerse myself into some kind of nihilist freak show, or discuss the nature of theology, I'd enroll in a freshman philosophy course where I could listen to all the 18-year-olds babble incessantly about what it is they think they know about the world.
That "Solaris" is a wide release ought to be a major embarrassment to the studio since this is clearly a film that belongs in an arthouse theater where all the pompous twits who like to sit through such drivel can go and have themselves a fine old time. Anybody who goes to this film at the local multiplex expecting to be entertained will be in for the shock of their life. It's the cinematic equivalent of getting a lecture from your parents about the nature of life.
Criticalia. Enrique Colmena (2/5)
Con un tono solemne que con demasiada frecuencia se transforma en tedio para el espectador, con planos tal vez excesivamente morosos que dificultan el seguimiento de una historia ya de por sí compleja, este "Solaris" no rehuye el tono adulto, consustancial a la ciencia ficción moderna desde "2001: Una Odisea del Espacio" (a la que, por cierto, homenajea en las bellísimas secuencias de las naves con forma de gigantescas ruedas giratorias) y "Blade Runner" (con un final que recuerda al de la obra maestra de Ridley Scott), e incluso se permite ofrecer una variante visual del fresco de la Creación del Hombre, de Miguel Ángel, clave final de una película irregular, a ratos fascinante, pero que se queda corta en su capacidad de transmitir y larga en sus desmedidas ambiciones.
Roger Ebert. Chicago Sun Times. (3.5/5)
Solaris" tells the story of a planet that reads minds, and obliges its visitors by devising and providing people they have lost, and miss. The Catch-22 is that the planet knows no more than its visitors know about these absent people. As the film opens, two astronauts have died in a space station circling the planet, and the survivors have sent back alarming messages. A psychiatrist named Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) is sent to the station, and when he awakens after his first night on board, his wife, Rheya (Natascha McElhone), is in bed with him. Some time earlier on earth, she had committed suicide.
In other words, Kelvin gets back not his dead wife, but a being who incorporates all he knows about his dead wife, and nothing else, and starts over from there. She has no secrets because he did not know her secrets. If she is suicidal, it is because he thought she was. The deep irony here is that all of our relationships in the real world are exactly like that, even without the benefit of Solaris. We do not know the actual other person. What we know is the sum of everything we think we know about them. Even empathy is perhaps of no use; we think it helps us understand how other people feel, but maybe it only tells us how we would feel, if we were them.
At a time when many American movies pump up every fugitive emotion into a clanging assault on the audience, Soderbergh's "Solaris" is quiet and introspective. There are some shocks and surprises, but this is not "Alien." It is a workshop for a discussion of human identity. It considers not only how we relate to others, but how we relate to our ideas of others--so that a completely phony, non-human replica of a dead wife can inspire the same feelings that the wife herself once did. That is a peculiarity of humans: We feel the same emotions for our ideas as we do for the real world, which is why we can cry while reading a book, or fall in love with movie stars. Our idea of humanity bewitches us, while humanity itself stays safely sealed away into its billions of separate containers, or "people."
Mercury News. Glen Lovell. (3/4)
But who's really alive? Kevin or Rheya? And if Rheya is real, what does this say about ``reality''? And if the line between the sentient and the imagined can be controlled by some intergalactic force (Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke imagined a black slab and stargate), what does this portend for physics and theology?
If your eyes are beginning to cross and your temples throb, don't despair -- you're not alone in your confusion. ``Solaris'' is meant as cinematic conundrum, a riddle wrapped in a mystery and all that. It reminds us that nothing in the universe is fully knowable. If that troubles you, this movie will trouble you. If that somehow reassures, like the notion of death as the ultimate dream state, then prepare yourself for the ultimate religious ``voyage.''
Newsday.com. John Anderson. (4/4)
"Solaris" ought to be accompanied by its own injunction: No one should enter if they've never been in love.
"Solaris" is a return to what sci-fi was meant to be: Not a way to titillate teenage boys, but a means of finding a context for complex human issues.
Much of "Solaris" is flashback, and in it we see that Rheya had an abortion and Kelvin leaves her only to return and discover that she killed herself.
Kelvin holds no dominion - to paraphrase the Dylan Thomas poem so prominent in the film - over sanity, or sense.
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