Reviewlette

Reviewlette [reh-vyoo-let] - noun
“A small review, usually of movies or music, lasting no more than a few hundred words. they are quite often media that old enough to be considered ‘retro’ by now. reviewlettes are usually spoiler-free, very subjective and often stray from the original topic.”

I am one of the millions of people who, in the fall of 2002 had better things to do than go see Solaris. I saw the previews and thought “Soderbergh and Cameron doing science fiction?!”. Then, just as quickly as that thought left my brain for the ether…so too did the movie leave theatres enroute to the home media market where it was then ignored by an even wider audience.


Solaris (the novel) was published in 1961 by writer Stanislaw Lem who began fully realizing his science fiction work after the destalinization of Poland. Contemporaries Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin and Isaac Asimov had been blazing a trail that was ready for the likes of Lem whose style evolved from classical science fiction to psychology-driven sci-fi. A dissertation could be written about Lem’s books but I’m going to stop the backstory right there.

At it’s core, the movie and the book Solaris, are about contact with a being very unlike our own –a hard topic to make interesting to a mass audience. We’ve seen this problem in the not-too-distant-past with Cameron’s The Abyss. (Some) audiences liked it but couldn’t figure out if it was true science fiction, a love story, an alien encounter, a movie about underwater oil drillers, a morality play about human behavior or just a really expensive use for an old power reactor.

Lem summed up the problem thusly:

“Science fiction almost always assumed the aliens we meet play some kind of game with us the rules of which we sooner or later may understand (in most cases the “game” was the strategy of warfare).”

The bottom line: George Clooney is calm, emotional and effective as psychiatrist Chris Kelvin who is put the task of finding out what happened on the Solaris observation station. Steven Soderbergh takes his time to tell the story that’s complicated to tell with words much less pictures. Cliff Martinez helps with an environmental musical score (recently used in the Night Driving VW commercial). And, well, Natascha McElhone (who I didn’t find attractive when I first saw her in Ronin but did after seeing this) plays Rheya - the most complicated role of any in Solaris.

Those looking for the escapist space flick should look elsewhere but true lovers of sci-fi, when mixed properly with psycology, should find Solaris a worthwhile use of 1.5 hours. While I rented it the first time, I liked it enough that I will put it in my movie collection.

But, hey, that’s my 2¢ …