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> > Don't mix up "Solaris - The Movie" with "Solaris - The Book". The
>> movie is very different from the book. Stanislaw Lem himself hates
>> Tarkovski's film version of his book.
>
> Whaaat, I think they're pretty much the same except that the movie is
>better (mostly because there's no boring happy end)!
Tell that to Stanislaw Lem... And the book (have you even read it?)
has an open - not a happy - end.
The book is a filosophical speculation about what exactly is
"intelligence"; about whether is it possible at all to communicate
with another civilization, if we endeed find one in outer space; and
what _is_ communication. Solaris is one of the science fiction
masterpieces. There's not some other symbolic sub-meaning in Solaris
- The Book. The book really is about the theme it seems to be about.
I think this clearness is the strongest power of the book.
Even before, Lem had critiziced a lot the (mostly) American idea of
alien races in scifi books: Alien lifeforms were always very
human-like - even living in human-like societies. So he made a book,
where the alien really is alien. The humans try to communicate with
it, and the alien tries to communicate with human beings. Both fail,
in a way, and then again, the intelligent oceans _succeeds_ to
communicate with humans, in a way. At least it can get a contact to
some parts of human brain that human beings themselves have no access.
The movie - which is extremely boring, pseudo-artistic and badly made
- uses the plot from the book, but ads all kind of artistic crap into
the soup, totally forgetting the original theme of the book. I can
understand Lem's disappointment very well... In Lem's book, there's
no Slavic melancholy or nostalgia, reflections from Tarkovski's own
life as an alternative artist in Soviet Union, pathetic symbolism,
pointless floating in zero gravity, etc... All this didn't prevent
the movie becoming to a canonized _art_ movie. (Then again, whatever
Godard shoots using whavever camera, it's always _art_, because it's
a Godard movie...)
Fortunately Tarkovski learned from his mistake and made his second
sci-fi movie in collaboration with the original authors (the
Strugatski brothers). Although again the movie has as little to do
with the original book as Blade Runner has with Dick's "Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep", at least this time the original _theme_ is
intact... I actually like Stalker, but I've often wondered, whether
Ridley Scott would've made a more faithful movie out of "Roadside
Picnic"...
Then again, Tarkovski's style would've worked very well, if _he'd_
made the film from "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"...
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