Solaris  (2002) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

The critics seem to have noticed a lovely wardrobe here, but the people have a different view of Emperor Soderbergh's new clothes. Verdict: naked. The following charts represent exit interview scores given by moviegoers to the pollsters at Cinema Score.

Solaris

Battlefield Earth

No film, to my knowledge, has ever come close to straight F's. That pretty much says it all. It is a bomb of nuclear proportions, the likes of which we have never before seen. That's the cake. The words below are just frosting.

The great Soviet-era filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky had an interesting career, the progress of which could be measured by the speed at which his characters moved. In his great work of youthful genius, Andrei Rublev, people walked at normal speed, on the ground, swinging their arms naturally, in a path which moved directly toward the target. Sometimes they ran, or even frolicked, when running was appropriate. With each successive film, his characters moved farther and farther from natural human behavior until, by the time he made Nostalghia, all the characters moved as if they were in a processional in some kind of Catholic liturgical rite, moving each foot only an inch or two in front of the other, weighted down by some kind of spiritual grief, taking indirect paths toward their target, or intentionally walking through water when solid ground was available, never swinging their arms but sometimes even carrying a candle ceremoniously.

In Andrei Rublev, people stand around in normal configurations, as if they were people. In Nostalghia, people pose in a stagy tableaux, as if acting in a 19th century theatrical performance. In Andrei Rublev, when one character asks a question, another responds naturally and rapidly. In Nostalghia, when somebody asks a question, the other person stares out of the window for a couple of minutes, then mutters a non-sequitur about his dead mother. The first time I watched Nostalghia, I thought my DVD player was broken because nothing moved. Then I realized that I could still read the sub-titles if I played the film at 8x speed, and at that speed the people move at exactly the right speed to duplicate actual human movement. Since Tarkovsky doesn't really use any background sound track except for dripping water noises, losing the sound really makes no difference, thus making the film an excellent 15-20 minute watch at 8x speed. Unfortunately for most people, they have to watch it at normal speed.

Based on Andrei Rublev, made when he was only 37, Tarkovsky could have been the greatest filmmaker of them all, but he gradually let the weight of ideas tip the balance against the weight of simple humanity in his filmmaking, and the man who should have been the Shakespeare of the cinema instead became a turtle-necked pretender to artistic gravitas.

In 1972, only three years after he made the dazzling Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky made an intellectual s/f story called Solaris, which was about people in a remote space station who, for some reason never really explained, create other living beings out of their imaginations. In the case of the main character, he brings his dead wife back from her suicide. This context provides the springboard for pretentious long-winded discussions about the nature of reality, God, nihilism, and various other philosophical issues. At that point in Tarkovsky's career, his films did not yet require 8x speed on the DVD player. He was in the 2x stage. The film is 165 minutes long, is in Russian, has virtually no music or background noise, and the characters move and speak at half speed. Therefore, it makes a fairly good 83 minute movie if you play it at 2x speed. There is no problem reading the sub-titles at that speed, because the characters take so long to respond to one another. In fact, when you play the film at 2x, the only thing wrong with it is that it looks cheesy, because there was no real attempt to create a feeling of being in space.

Steven Soderbergh was nice enough to fix all that. He remade the script closely, using a little more than half the running time, added some scary monster chiller horror music, and spent tens of millions of dollars to make it look like they were in space on a real spaceship.

And the characters almost seem to be moving at normal speed.

Almost.

This was still a great improvement over Tarkovsky's version, however, since it now looks good, and will only bore you for 98 minutes instead of 165.