Solaris [1972] | ![Solaris [1972]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51E9M0HM05L._SL160_.jpg)
 enlarge | Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Actors: Natalya Bondarchuk, Donatas Banionis, Jueri Jaervet, Vladislav Dvorzhetsky, Nikolai Grinko
Studio: Artificial Eye
Category: DVD
List Price: £23.99
Buy New: £6.46
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Rating:  31 reviews
Sales Rank: 3199
Format: Black & White, Colour, Dubbed, Pal, Widescreen
Languages: German (Original Language), Russian (Original Language), English (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), German (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled), Portuguese (Subtitled), Italian (Subtitled), Dutch (Subtitled), Swedish (Subtitled), Hebrew (Subtitled), Japanese (Subtitled), Russian (Subtitled)
Rating: Parental Guidance
Region: 2
Discs: 2
Number Of Discs: 2
Running Time: 159 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5.4 x 0.6
EAN: 5021866211305
ASIN: B00005UCZL
Theatrical Release Date: 1972
Release Date: January 21, 2002
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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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
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| Customer Reviews: Read 26 more reviews...
 Learning one's place October 26, 2007
calmly
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
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 October 12, 2007
Mr. J. Cook
1 out of 13 found this review helpful
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 August 23, 2007
Trevor Willsmer (London, England)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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 cliches: "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.
Tarkovsky Masterpiece August 3, 2007
Svetlana Lensselink (NL)
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
Think will not lie if say that it's one of the best (if not the best Tarkovsky movie). As a director he have very unusual vision of things.
He can show you a scene of ten minutes, where only rain falls and you will watch it as charmed, cause there is smth in it, but it's almost impossible to understand what.
The biggest difference between Solaris of Tarkovsky (1972 year) and Solaris of Soderbergh (2002 year) is that in first one the movie is more about person and a planet, about feeling of simple human being. In Solaris from 2002 the film is more about relationship between man and woman (and according to book it was not the main line in the book of Stanislav Lem)
Solaris of Tarkovsky was, is and always will be one of the best russian movie's, cause this film is rightfully is Classic of Russian Cinematography. And 5 stars is even too low for this film.
Please, Please Forget About 2001 October 21, 2006
Phillip Kay (Sydney)
18 out of 22 found this review helpful
A spaceship has discovered signs of intelligent life on another planet. Study continues over a period of years from an orbiting space station. Back on earth concern is felt, as the main result has been loss of life - astronauts have gone missing or suicided. The last to die is the friend of an investigating psychologist, who is sent out to determine if the cost of study has not been too high and charged to close down the station if he thinks so, and with it the attempt to contact another intelligent life form in the universe.
This is not the subject, but the background to Tarkovsky's film of Lem's Solaris, alluded to or left to the viewer to infer. The film is mainly concerned with the interaction of memory and love in the psyche, and the thought that contact with intelligence unmodified with love would be meaningless or dangerous; curiosity - callous or cruel - is merely a throwaway observation. On the planet Solaris the ocean stands for the psyche - immense and unknown.
The investigator is a man who puts duty before love. His love is deeply felt but unexpressed. His home, his father and his wife have all felt abandoned, and his wife has suicided at his apparent rejection of her.
On Solaris the ocean, a seeming source of intelligent life on the planet, has made contact with the astronauts, and uncovered memories, some of them hidden, painful ones, in their minds. They have visitors from their pasts, women and children. The investigator discovers his dead wife, and falls in love with her.
She is a memory (or is she a planet?) and has no memory of her own, which frightens her. But the investigator, Chris, falls in love with her, the memory, more securely than with the real wife he abandoned. Memory is seductive. It creates a real world we can live with, more perfect than the real world. Chris can love his wife Hari on Solaris. He can embrace his father, with whom on earth he has been so reserved.
So he makes his judgment and lives surrounded by his memories on Solaris, imperfect as they are - symbolised by a strange shot of his father in the family home, who goes about his daily chores while it begins to rain - inside the house, not outside.
The space team on earth will send another investigator. What will he find, what will he do? The film leaves this to the viewer to conceive.
Space, the journey among the stars, the space station, the ocean of life, all this is passed over by Tarkovsky. His film is like the other half, the interior side, of Kubrick's 2001. One is an odyssey, the other an Ithika (the lost epic, the blind Homer).
The power of the film is in its suggestive capabilities. The scenic beauty, the ruined space station, the ocean, and their contrasts, the conflict-ridden world of the astronauts, and the scientists who send them to their deaths or illusions, the beautiful Bach on the soundtrack: all edited seamlessly to enforce meditation on Tarkovsky's themes.
The film certainly has flaws. Some of the long takes are too long (especially the expressway scene, which lasts a full five minutes). Subtitles are displayed too quickly. On the other hand they are good at expressing subtle and oblique thoughts. At 165 minutes the film is long but rarely felt so.
So back to the film's final shot. Is it better to love an illusion than not to love at all? Which is the illusion, love - or truth? If the ocean is god, what matters more, love or truth? If the ocean is not god, is the illusion of love self-destructive (because self-deluding) or self-enhancing (because it results in survival, and in contact - contact with an unknown part of the psyche, the universe which might enhance or destroy us). Must we be destroyed in order to survive? Is illusion destructive or creative? Is what happens to us within our control?
Solaris is not a film, but a poem. Its power is in what it makes us think. Just like the ocean on the planet Solaris. Some critics think it bad because the special effects are limited. I, on the other hand, think the point is the Bach on the soundtrack.
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