XDA

Saw the 2002 version of Solaris again on IFC and it was better than when I saw it in the theaters. I have been a big Stanislaw Lem fan for most of my adult life and I've read all his books translated into English which is at least most of them. I started with Solaris which remains by a very thin edge his best (Fiasco is also excellent). I even suffered through the oppressively long and bad Russian version of the Lem novel in 1972. Until the reviewing of the Clooney version of Solaris, I just thought it was impossible to film Lem right.

The director, Steven Soderbergh, was on a roll after a sophmore slump after Sex, Lies and Videotape, making, between 1998 and 2001, several good movies, Out of Sight, The Limey, Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and Ocean's 11. Solaris, while science fiction on a budget, was his last gasp before a break and it has some of his best and worst qualities about it. I don't care about the acting or direction or set decoration--let's think about the ideas inherent in the book and this version on film. They are not that hard really.

Although the planet looked gaseous in the filmk it has a 'sentient' ocean on it. I got the idea reading the book that here on Earth after life began, the cells evolved (sorry, Ann) into separate entities that carried the sea in which they first lived around inside them and the separate individuals and then the separate order, phylum and species were not united in consciousness. On Solaris, the cells never developed into separate individuals but the whole sea was one organism with an astonishing consciousness.

Here's where it gets a little more difficult--Lem seems to say that we would have to treat a truly alien life form, clearly as superior as it is different from us, as we treat the concept of God, what Clooney called the human concept of God in the film. It would be unknowable, as God is unknowable to most of us. And unknowable, we could never tell interacting with it whether it would be benign or murderous; whether it would love or hate us or be supremely indifferent.

I got the idea from the book that as we humans on the orbiting station studied the sentient ocean, it studied us and one of the ways it studied us was to take a memory from us, make it real, confront us with the real memory and see how we reacted. Clooney was lucky to get a beloved object, his suicide wife, and Lem hinted that others on the station were not so lucky and had either nightmares or very bad memories as their visitor. That one of the planet-made life forms could kill (even in self defense) would have been, I think, foreign to Lem. A horrible enough memory, always there, impossible to destroy would cause us to kill ourself so why be violent if death is what the ocean wanted, assuming it wanted anything or could even want, as ego and desire are human constructs and attributes.

OK. so what happens? In the book, I can't remember what happens to the wife copy but the main character goes down to the planet and has the amazing but limited contact one can have with the sentient ocean. It is a subtle but powerful ending without resolution. Hollywood (even the Russians) wasn't having any of that. They're here to have a story, by God, on film. So here goes.

At first Clooney is repulsed by the copy and has to send it away. Then the second copy, when she knows she's a second copy, is repulsed by the thought of being a copy and commits suicide (again) first ineffectually and then permanently with the scifi mumbo jumbo positronic ray or whatever. But the liquid oxygen attempt is important because it shows the copies cannot be destroyed physically by, say, drinking liquid oxygen or cutting oneself with a knife. Her cheek and throat burns heal before our eyes and she's fine. So what changes at the end? Her death in the whatever ray causes the planet to react, to come to the station literally. Clooney is about to escape to Earth (where it rains all the freakin time apparently) when he has more memories.

If the dead wife copies are only a physical manifestation of Clooney's memories, then his memories and her memories would necessarily be congruent, that is she could only have his (he could have more than hers). They are congruent in a way. She says he found her after her death (unless that's just a deduction, something she could not know) but she does not remember the cut on his finger (which he says he did after she died) and she says there are no photos in their apartment, even on the refrigerator (but Clooney either has or remembers that there is a photo of her on the fridge). So I think that Clooney realizes that the copy is not mere copy but real in every sense and he aborts his escape, stays on the station and probably dies as it is swallowed up by the expanding planet.

So what's his voice over scenes back on Earth? Now he is the copy (somewhere but perhaps not anywhere physical) and as soon as he realizes he is a copy, when his cut finger heals instantaneously, he is reunited with copy wife and death will have no dominion... The benign god-like planet acts like the 'human' concept of God and forgives the two and they dwell in love forever.

But has Clooney always been a copy? The 'dream' he has of his friend who calls him to the station but commits suicide before he gets there (actually kind of a rough life Clooney has--everyone he likes offs him or herself) is key to this question. The friend calls him a puppet who thinks he is a man. He has the cut on his finger when this wife copy first gets there on the station but we see the finger after he has cut it before us and there is no scar. It gets impenetrable there, I think, and I like that in a movie, like the central mystery in Picnic at Hanging Rock impenetrable but not frustrating. Kind of like the human concept of God or how practically we would have to react to a truly alien, truly superior life form. You can see how it all hangs together better. Still slow, but much more satisfying.

I'm glad I gave it a second go.