1972 - SOLARIS, epic Russian science fiction film is dense and very long.

A blog that only does short reviews of films, is probably no place to review this long, difficult and very interesting science fiction film from Andrei Tarkovsky a man who saw films as art with a capital "A."

This film was supposedly Tarkovsky's answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey, although I am not sure what he disliked about that film.  Tarkovsky practically throws out everything that is in a science fiction film.  There are no shots of spaceships flying through space and he seems completely uninterested in the trappings of technology things that are usually a staple of this genre.

Instead what a viewer gets is a long meditation about the nature of memory and love.  All presented very deliberately with the camera moving slowly around the space station and the protagonists as Tarkovsky works to set a very careful and delicate mood.  It is all extremely well done.

 

To be very honest, this is a film that has taken me several viewings to finally get through.  This is not a throw it on the DVD player and casually watch it kind of film.  Even writing a capsule review of Solaris kind of cheapens it.

A very interesting film but difficult to view without putting some effort into it.
The screenplay was by Friedrich Gorenstein and Andrei Tarkovsky.  The running time is165 minutes.