SOLARIS

They don’t make them like this anymore. And my God, they should. This isn’t anything as base as a movie. It isn’t an excuse to make money. Or get bums on seats. Nor is it an attempt to con punters out of cash. This isn’t anything but art on celluloid.

Solaris is the best science fiction film I’ve seen in twenty years. It’s a bona fide absolute classic.

George Clooney was right. This film is not, and never will, make an enormous amount of money. In ten, twenty, maybe thirty years, the film will eventually reclaim it’s budget. It’s reputation will stretch far beyond box-office receipts. But making movies isn’t about profits. If you were in the business of making money , you’d be investing in Gas Mask technology and trying to get contracts to rebuild Iraq from your buddies in the CIA.

This movie isn’t about making money. It isn’t about spaceships. It isn’t about invasions, or lasers, or any of that bullshit. It’s true sci-fi, the type of sci-fi that uses the possibilities of a futuristic environment to explore concepts and ideas. It doesn’t use the possibilities of sci-fi as a quick and lazy shortcut to a space battle between monsters and mankind.

So, what is Solaris? The question is often asked, but never answered. At one point one character even comes out and states, there are no answers, and the harder you search for some, the less you find.

Solaris is a journey. It’s an exploration. An exploration of that feeling : what if you had someone and lost them? What if that someone was your east and your west, your north and south, your everything, and then one day your everything went away and you never even had the chance to say goodbye. It was the door that was always open in your mind, that wound that never healed, that eternal question that was never answered. Why?

Solaris offers you the chance you thought you’d never have again. What if you could see them again? What if you could spend as long with them as you ever wanted? What if you could answer every question, close every door, get every answer to every question you ever had? What if you could make your life make perfect sense again?

Of course you would. It’s not a new idea, or a new approach, but its done so beautifully and so effectively that one can only now fully comprehend the enormity of such a situation.

And so, crushed with the loss of his lover, subsumed into a dull existence of routine boredom and survival we call life, George Clooney is offered the chance to go to somewhere, or something, some place called Solaris and find out exactly what happened on this now abandoned space station. A place where there are no answers. A place where people appear and disappear, where people give answers that never answer the question, where no-one knows who or what is going on, who you are – or who you were, or who you are going to be.

For every question there is, there is an answer – of a sort. For every answer, another question. Another mystery to be solved. For all these things, there are no answers. Solaris is a maze. An exploration of the very core of humanity. Was it to be human? What are the things that we hold dearest to us? How do we know that we are human?

But this, Solaris, is an example of true Sci-Fi. One that explores the nature and possibilities of what it is to be human and provides insight into the soul. It’s one of the best films of recent years, and certainly the best sci-fi film made since the early 80’s. An absolute, definitive, career-defining classic.