Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3126 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-01-21
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Number of discs: 2
• Formats: Black & White, Colour, Dubbed, PAL, Widescreen
• Original language: German, Russian
• Subtitled in: English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Hebrew, Japanese, Russian
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 159 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Released in 1972, Solaris is Andrei Tarkovsky's third feature and his most far-reaching examination of human perceptions and failings. It's often compared to Kubrick's 2001, but although both bring a metaphysical dimension to bear on space exploration, Solaris has a claustrophobic intensity which grips the attention over spans of typically Tarkovskian stasis. Donatas Banionis is sympathetic as the cosmonaut sent to investigate disappearances on the space station orbiting the planet Solaris, only to be confronted by his past in the guise of his dead wife, magnetically portrayed by Natalya Bondarchuk. The ending is either a revelation or a conceit, depending on your viewpoint.

On the DVD: Solaris reproduces impressively on DVD in widescreen--which is really essential here--and Eduard Artemiev's ambient score comes over with pristine clarity. There are over-dubs in English and French, plus subtitles in 12 languages. An extensive stills gallery, detailed filmographies for cast and crew, and comprehensive biographies of Tarkovsky and author Stanislaw Lem are valuable extras, as are the interviews with Bondarchuk and Tarkovsky's sister and an amusing 1970s promo-film for Banionis. It would have been better had the film been presented complete on one disc, instead of stretched over two. Even so, the overall package does justice to a powerful and disturbing masterpiece. --Richard Whitehouse

DVD Description
DVD Special Features:

Filmographies
Stills Gallery
Andrei Tarkovsky and Stainslaw Lem biographies
Interview with actress Natalya Bondarchuk
Lead actor Donatas Banionas featurette
Interview with Andrei Tarkovsky's sister Marina Tarkovskaya
Subtitles: English, French, German, Spanish, Portugese, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese and Russian
Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack in English, Russian and French
Enhanced for Widescreen TVs

Synopsis
SOLARIS, director Andrei Tarkovsky's science fiction cult classic, presents an uncompromisingly unique and poetic meditation on space travel and its physical and existential ramifications. When a long-standing Russian space station hovering above the planet Solaris begins to report strange phenomena, Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis), an eager and intrepid cosmonaut, departs for the station in order to investigate. Warned by former Solaris specialists that the planet presents incomprehensible obstacles, Kelvin is nevertheless secure in his mission. However, the minute he steps foot onto the haunted and desolate space station, everything changes. Kelvin learns that of the three members left on board, one has killed himself and the remaining two have seemingly become schizophrenic recluses. When Kelvin's dead ex-wife appears out of the shadows, the reports that Solaris is a thinking being capable of reading human minds and materializing their desires and memories are proven true. As Kelvin joins the rest of the crew in a seemingly life-or-death struggle to understand this phenomena, Tarkovsky crafts a mind-altering earthbound space odyssey. Filled with visions of humanity versus itself, SOLARIS takes the philosophical investigations of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY to extravagant lengths and offers no answers except this: The only frontier humanity has yet to conquer is that of its own existence.

Customer Reviews

Learning one's place
We find a creature who seems far more advanced than we are. Who we might like to destroy but hardly know if we can. Who can seemingly turn our minds against us. For whom we don't seem to be a priority at all. Of whom our best minds manage only feeble speculations.

I saw this movie first and only recently read Lem's story. Tarkovsky got a great start from Lem. It's difficult to compare text and movie. Tarkovsky seemed to have been reasonably faithful to the contents of the book, but added a long introduction as well as his own ending. Both works are impressive. Tarkovsky seems to linger often so a good deal of patience is a prerequisite for enjoying this film.

Now that I've read Lem's "Solaris", I'm less satisfied with Tarkovsky's "Solaris". Lem's book moved along well. Tarkovskky's added introduction (including moving up the inquiry of Burton) accomplishes little and the ending may be more explicit than is needed: hasn't Solaris already done enough to impress? On the other hand, Tarkovsky's cast is excellent (I especially enjoyed Hari and Snow) and visually the movie is a treat.

The Anti-2001 A Space Odyssey
I kept waiting for the film to start. Was vaguely intrigued during the first half, if only because I was thinking "something has to happen at some point". I found myself watching the second half however in smaller and smaller instalments, driven to distraction by the tedium of it, until I must admit I gave up. I would contrast the film with other works of art concerned with the journey towards some enigmatic horror in an unknown realm: 2001 and Conrad's Heart of Darkness. They expertly pique the reader's/viewer's interest with incident throughout the journey and, even more impressively, deliver a revelation that outstrips the reader's/viewer's wildest expectations. By contrast the journey and the destination in Tarkovsky's film seemed free of any great interest whether philosophical, psychological or visual.

Islands of memory
Unlike Soderbergh's interminable and seemingly much longer take on Stanislaw Lem's novel, Tarkovsky's Solaris is a sensual film, but one where the senses aren't exactly numbed as dulled into a kind of half-dreamlike state. Like the reeds in the opening shot, you have to go with the ebb and flow - it's almost more of a feeling than a film. And, it has to be said, at times that feeling can be like being lulled to the verge of sleep, while at others it's like being caught up in a fever. It's tempting to wonder what Werner Herzog makes of the film.

Lem famously disliked the film with a passion, feeling it gave into the heart rather the head with trite clichés: "Instead of focusing on deeper moral questions related to frontiers of human knowledge, he made a drama-type Crime and Punishment in space, by making up unnecessary characters of parents and relatives, then adding a hut on an island," was one of his less bitter comments after he fell out with Tarkovsky writing the script, although that implies a far more sentimental film than Tarkovsky delivered. Certainly the issue of whether the visitors are a gift, an experiment, a probe or a defensive psychological attack on the scientists is all but ignored in favour of their emotional effects on Kelvin and (to a much lesser effect) the scientists: these characters really aren't looking for answers, they're looking for a mirror, and it's their insular nature that condemns them to literally float in their own islands of memory (or a 'hut on an island' if you ascribe to Lem's view).

Rather than a formulaic movie redemption tale or Lem's examination of our inability to truly comprehend a superior alien intelligence because of the biological limitations imposed on us almost as design faults, Tarkovsky's film is about the limitations we impose on ourselves regardless of how far we technically advance and our inability to rise above them. Its nominal hero, Kelvin, is not a pleasant man and the film makes little attempt to bring the audience to his side. He treats the disgraced Cosmonaut Burton with insensitivity, professes a ruthless scientific pragmatism that allows for no human element and his immediate response to his first 'guest' on the Solaris research station is to deceive and dispose of her. Yet ultimately, as much because of his emotional limitations as in spite of them, he's the one human being who acts most humanely by recognising, albeit in a totally self-centred way, that the fault lies not in the stars but in themselves. Like Burton's young son with the horse in the lengthy prologue on Earth, he displays a childlike fear and rejection of something he doesn't understand before reluctantly accepting that it may have beauty, even if it's a beauty he cannot comfortably embrace.

But the most human character remains the least human: Hari, or rather his image of his dead wife Hari, unable to feel anything that he does not remember for her, stifled by his limitations and gradually assuming a painful awareness and despair of her own. Ironically, it's as she becomes more human that she becomes more unstable. To the other scientists it's because the visitors are unstable neutrino systems, but it's when the artificial Hari studying a painting - another artificial creation of man's consciousness - which triggers a real memory that the horror of her situation as a mere facsimile strikes home. To Kelvin she's at first more a penance than a second chance, a condemnation to repeat history while remaining oblivious - as he presumably did with the real Hari - to the person she is really becoming.

So, not exactly a barrel of laughs, but strangely compelling if you go with it. The 165 minutes don't exactly fly by, but they certainly can get under your skin if you're in a receptive mood and it's not hard to see why it's been so influential on Hollywood sci-fi (Sphere, Event Horizon and Star Trek The Motion Picture among the most prominent).

Sadly, I was shocked by just how bad the picture quality of the first hour of Criterion's Region 1 NTSC DVD was compared to the PAL Russico/Artificial Eye Region 2 PAL one - aside from some grading and subtitle changes it looks like you're watching a bad standards conversion of a video tape that's been burned onto a CD-R for all of the Earth-bound sequences, although the colour is better. If it weren't for the better extras package - including several deleted/extended scenes and detailed interviews - I doubt I'd have kept this copy. So, if you're wondering which to buy, the Criterion NTSC disc has the better extras but the Artificial Eye PAL disc has the better picture.