Stanislaw Lem's novel Solaris is one of those novels that proves how difficult science fiction can be to adapt to other mediums. Two filmmakers separated by a generation have taken a crack at it and both missed the point.
As a story Solaris is as simple as it gets. A research station orbiting an alien planet experiences some trouble and a psychologist is dispatched to determine if the project should be shutdown.
What the psychologist discovers is just how alien alien contact is. The planet Solaris has been attempting contact with manifestations of people or things from their past. Our psychologist must attempt to understand why when his dead wife returns to him.
Both versions of the films follow this template to the letter. Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 version proves to be more faithful than Steven Soderburg's version in 2002. At least in terms of whole scenes lifted verbatim from Lem's novel. Both films emphasize a love story and that was never the point of the book.
A film professor I studied under maintained that people go to movies to experience an emotion. I think he is correct. Both films hang on the love story as that is probably an easier hook for an audience than anything else. Science Fiction doesn't deal in terms of those emotions as much. What science fiction excells at is Wonder.
And Wonder, despite the ability for filmmakers to craft any image, is seemingly hard to convey. Lem's novel is all about Wonder. Humans attempting to understand an alien intelligence through any means necessary and failing utterly.
All that said I don't think either of these films fail as an experience. These are vehicles for the filmmakers own ideas that they took from Lem's novel. Tarkovsky's version in particular seems to understand better not only why the humans misunderstand the nature of the contact. But the planet itself seems to understand where it went wrong.
Soderberg's version deviates the most only because it follows a more Hollywood like plot structure including a third act twist to produce a villian and an action sequence. It also only plays lip service to some of the greater ideas from the book. I think it succeeds in making the wife a little more human than the Russian version. It also can't hold a candle to those long philophical arguments that Tarkovsky loves.
I think what I find most curious about this is even with the original text (translated of course) and two different interpretations of the book filmed the ultimate answer is still waiting to be uncovered. And Stanislaw Lem would probably appreciate that.
Right on Neal. I find it interesting that film, having such potential in the wonder department, failed to convey this emotion from the book. What wonderful ideas to consider and how sad to lose them because they don't translate into an "entertainment" style that destroys by it's very nature the sense of wonder that they are trying to show.
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