Filmed under the watchful eye of Russia's communist regime, Andrei Tarkovsky's adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's 1961 novel is a remarkable feat of cinema.
It is a haunting, beautiful sci-fi epic that's not only an Eastern bloc riposte to Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey", but also a meditation on humanity, love, and the unknowable nature of the universe.
When contact is lost with a space station orbiting an ocean-covered planet on the edge of the galaxy, the authorities send cosmonaut psychologist Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) to interview the three-man crew.
When Kelvin arrives, he discovers the space station in near-ruins, one of the crew dead, and the others haunted by strange apparitions. Within a few hours of his arrival, Kelvin begins to experience the hallucinations himself, seeing his dead wife (Natalya Bondarchuk).
Are these invaders real or imaginary? Are they the products of the crew's memories, or are they connected to the "living" planet the station's orbiting? Is it trying to communicate with them, attack them, or subject them to some kind of experiment?
Rejecting the cold, post-human vision of Kubrick's space odyssey, "Solaris" is a cat's cradle of human emotions, tortured grief, and abject despair.
Putting his human characters at the centre of this stark universe, Tarkovsky sidesteps the pseudo-religious grandstanding of Kubrick's extraterrestrial acid-trip in favour of a series of imponderable questions.
Anchored by the captivating physical presence of Banionis, "Solaris" delves into the depths of Kelvin's childhood, Oedipal longing, and guilty sense of failure to offer a vision that offers suffering but not enlightenment.
"We have lost our sense of the Cosmic," opines one of the station's surviving scientists amidst the elegiac church organ score. As he takes us on a journey into inner space, Tarkovsky argues that the real final frontier lies within ourselves, not on the edges of the solar system.
Steven Soderbergh's "Solaris" remake is out in cinemas on 28th February 2003.
Solaris (1972)
