|
It is cold on the space station Prometheus, where those aboard
suffer almost as excruciating a punishment as the construct’s
namesake. The station is all metal and glass, a steely tomb
that encases a world full of death and delusion—outside, the
purplish planet Solaris burns with a kind of mystical light,
while inside, life remains at a glacial standstill.
But the cold is no more pervasive on that mysterious ship
than it is on Earth, at least for Chris Kelvin (Clooney),
a psychiatrist brought in to investigate the bizarre goings-on
aboard Prometheus. His life on terra firma consists of icy
train rides to and from his empty apartment, where he watches
raindrops haphazardly streak across his bedroom window. For
Kelvin, Prometheus is a relief: It’s a ready-made hell, an
escape from the mental prison he has erected for himself on
Earth. The dead lay locked in coffins, the living in memories.
For Kelvin, the specter of his long-dead wife, Rheya (McElhone),
is inescapable. She was beautiful and brilliant, an intoxicating
mixture of fire and ice, who attains perfection through her
husband’s fuzzy, melancholy recollections. He finds the request
to probe Prometheus an inviting one, as if memories evaporate
as soon as one leaves the troposphere. He arrives only to
find that his good friend and mission commander Gibarian has
committed suicide, and that the two remaining crew members
(Davis and Davies) are exhibiting signs of extreme
paranoia.
And while all signs point to sci-fi suspense, director Steven
Soderbergh wisely sidesteps the impulse to drench each
frame in blood, mimicking the Tarkovsky adaptation
by utilizing Solaris simply as a setting, not a plot point.
Solaris doesn’t give us macabre extraterrestrials à
la Alien—what makes the film intelligent, daring, and
downright spooky is its knowledge that the only bogeymen who
can hurt us are the apparitions existing within our own minds.
The planet Solaris draws on these phantasms, forcing them
out of the psyche and into the real world. Asleep aboard Prometheus,
Kelvin wakes up to find his wife beside him, her arms wrapped
around him as if she had never left. He is awarded a second
chance at love, but can the past be revisited when our minds
have so substantially reshaped it?
Solaris uses Kelvin’s memory as a blueprint in its construction
of Rheya, but it is unable to fill in the gaps, the parts
of her he never knew or understood. “It’s the puppet’s dream,
being human,” utters one character, and Kelvin begins to comprehend
that the wife he sees before him is nothing more than a toy,
her actions manipulated by his will: She’s a pre-Blue Fairy
Pinocchio.
What’s interesting is that faux-Rheya begins to question
the validity of her existence as well. She understands that
she is nothing more than a photocopy of Kelvin’s dead wife,
and therefore has no real memory or feelings about their life
together—her sad realization makes us wonder if the people
we love are merely substitutions for ones we have lost. Solaris
is an often eerie, always thoughtful meditation on the slipperiness
of human actuality, and how well one person can truly know
another. “There are no answers, only choices,” says the suicidal
Gibarian. For the characters in Solaris, only death
brings an understanding of life.
— Erin Steele
|
out of 5
While we would never encourage anyone to destroy a video... 
