Time: 166 Minutes
Age Rating: M
Cast:
Donatas Banionis as Kris Kelvin
Natalya Bondarchuk as Hari
Jüri Järvet as Dr. Snaut
Vladislav Dvorzhetsky as Henri Burton
Nikolai Grinko as Kelvin’s Father
Olga Barnet as Kelvin’s Mother
Anatoly Solonitsyn as Dr. Sartorius
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky

Solaris was a movie I had been meaning to watch for a while. It comes from Andrei Tarkovsky, the director of Stalker, which I found to be excellent. I had previously watched the remake from Steven Soderbergh and I was curious about the original. While Solaris certainly has a lot of elements that I admired and respected, it unfortunately just wasn’t for me. 

The fact that I was into Stalker and wasn’t into Solaris was truly surprising. Both of them are meditative and steadily paced films around 3 hours long, but this one didn’t grab me. One thing is that there’s certainly a lot to admire in the movie; it poses some existential and interesting questions and there’s plenty of themes about life, love, human nature and memory. That said, I found that the ideas were more interesting than the actual film and experience. It is glacially paced and a bit too subdued for me. The first act was certainly slow, but at that point I still had enough patience that I was willing to stick with it, and that only decreased over time. Despite the human nature of the story, it just didn’t resonate with me; I found it to be very sluggish and lost interest.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s direction is really good. It is visually beautiful and makes effective use of simplified production design, especially with the scenes set on the space station. The long takes are filled with atmosphere and there is an element of dread throughout much of the movie, again mainly with the space station scenes. 

Solaris has some great visuals and some themes and ideas with potential, but was unbearably slow and I couldn’t be invested or connected with any of it. Perhaps I just wasn’t in the right headspace for this movie, but from this first viewing, it didn’t work for me.