The great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky dismissed what I believe is the greatest Science Fiction movie ever made, when he criticized Kubrick’s “2001” as a shallow, technologically driven depiction of the future. Tarkovsky was interested in how man relates to a threatening environment when he created his version of a high-brow serious science fiction movie. The resultant film, “Solaris”, is filled with modest special effects and visually stunning cinematography.
Donatas Banionis stars as Kris Kelvin, who is a clinical psychologist about to embark on an interstellar journey to evaluate what is happening on a decades-old spaceship that is positioned over an oceanic planet called Solaris. The station is inhabited by three scientists, who have been relaying strange messages back to earth. Once Kelvin arrives at the station, he finds that one of the scientists is already dead, while neither of the other two take the time to greet him upon his arrival. The Planet Solaris seems to be some sort of living entity capable of responding to the x-ray probing messages transmitted by the scientists. This response is some sort of sensorial probe relayed back, that can read and interpret the subconscious human mind within the inhabitants of the orbiting station. The planet then creates living guests from these memories, placing them inside the ship alongside the humans, from whose memories these guests were created. The guest created for Kelvin was his long-deceased wife Hari (a beautiful Natalya Bondarchuk), who had committed suicide ten years earlier.
What is interesting is that while Kelvin’s mission is to obtain the truth, his initial response to his dead-wife- guest is to destroy her by shooting her out into space. Since she is not human, she just reappears again the next day, forcing him to face his subconscious and the strange phenomenon directly. This time, he decides to relate to her directly and they spend the night and subsequent days together. The fascinating characteristic about the Hari- guest is that she is intelligent with her own self-consciousness but lacking any distant memories beyond those created during the few days she exists. Since Hari was created through the mind of Kelvin, her character and personality are limited by what only Kelvin knew of her. If the real Hari had secrets, this new one knows nothing of them. Since Kelvin seems to have been in love with his wife, this version becomes a person he can easily fall in love with again. This illusion raises the question as to whether we truly love a person or just our image of that person. In the same context, the question as to whether true love is just an illusion becomes the philosophical center of the movie. Within the movie there is an inner battle being fought between the spiritual and the concrete, science and fate, reason, and belief. Using a tale from the near future to address these issues was something unseen before within the Science fiction Genre. Tarkovsky, as opposed to Kubrick, keeps the technology of the period and story deep in the background, allowing for more psychological implications of what the alien planet is doing to take precedent over everything else.
One fascinating aspect of the alien Hari is her initial dependence to Kelvin. When she first appears, she is unable to be anywhere without him. I kept asking myself if this was because these were the limitations as a newly created being or was it just a reflection as to how Kelvin himself subconsciously thinks of his dead wife. Kelvin seems to retain a deep inner guilt about the real Hari’s suicide that helps create this submissive version of the seemingly same woman. However, this is not the real Hari. Rather, a memory induced caricature of the real woman. Still, the Hari-guest is a self-aware being with great feelings and emotions. So much so that eventually she grows independent and can function alone, away from Kelvin. In this way, “Solaris” asks a similar question to what Kubrick did in his film. The question being what constitutes life? Hari is to Tarkovsky what HAL is to Kubrick, except here Tarkovsky does not ease the difficult question by removing humanity from the artificially created guest. The Hari-guest looks, feels and reacts like a human being, making the question about life that much more intense. Kelvin shows real affection to her, but is this due to his inner subconscious guilt stemming from the real Hari’s suicide? Or maybe he has fallen in love with his idealization of what he wanted the real Hari to be. The movie gives no clear answers to these questions.
Tarkovski is a slow, deliberate director, and he lets his scenes develop to what they become in a very somber and timeless manner. In many instances, such as the beginning when Kelvin is roaming outside his father’s country estate, the slow pace allowed me to study the man’s movements and the tranquil, dreamlike atmosphere of his surroundings. When within the confines of the space station, these same slowly developing scenes gave me the ability to really feel the loneliness of being isolated in space. This is something many science-fiction movies using expensive special effects try to do with much less success.
There is a form of special kinship with this very heady science fiction and some, later, more action-packed movies, such as “Matrix”. The idea of what life is and how it is controlled is hinted at strongly through a mysterious and superb ending that made me think repeatedly about the ideas being portrayed in the movie.
While he did not particularly appreciate Kubrick’s, “2001”, Tarkovsky’s, “Solaris”, is its intellectual kindred spirit, as one of the cinema’s great science- fiction masterpieces. It is a movie of intense internal beauty that needs to be seen by all serious fans of cinema.
1001 Movies before you die 
Yep, probably the great intellectual SF movie.
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