Thursday, April 21, 2011
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.
165 minutes.
Labels:
1972,
foreign films,
SCI-FI,
TARKOVSKY
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