Solaris

Solaris

Opening Shot

Water plants sway in a river current. The camera holds on them for so long that you start to see them as something other than plants: tentacles, maybe, or fingers. Vadim Yusov's cinematography opens on Earth, in a landscape so lush and specific that when the film moves to the space station, the loss of this green is physical. Tarkovsky films the river and the trees and the rain as if documenting a world the characters have already left.

What It Does

The space station sequences are deliberately claustrophobic. Yusov shoots the corridors and rooms with a flatness that contrasts sharply with the organic depth of the Earth scenes. The ocean of Solaris, visible through the station windows, is represented by shifting colors and textures that Tarkovsky achieved through chemical reactions filmed in close-up. The effect is unsettling because the ocean looks alive without looking like anything terrestrial. It's thinking. You can tell.

Artemyev's electronic score, combined with Tarkovsky's use of Bach's chorale prelude "Ich ruf zu dir," creates a soundtrack that moves between the mechanical and the sacred. The Bach appears during the moments of greatest emotional intensity, and Tarkovsky deploys it as Kris Kelvin's emotional memory: music from Earth, played in orbit, to a dead wife who may or may not be a projection of an alien intelligence.

Natalya Bondarchuk as Hari (the resurrected wife) gives a performance of extraordinary delicacy. She plays a copy who knows she's a copy but feels the feelings anyway, and the question of whether copied emotions are real emotions is carried entirely by her face. Watch the scene where she drinks liquid nitrogen to kill herself (she can't die; the ocean regenerates her). Bondarchuk plays the moment not as horror but as frustration. She can't even succeed at not existing.

Why It's on the List

Solaris is the anti-2001. Where Kubrick's film argues that the universe is indifferent to human consciousness, Tarkovsky's argues that the universe is responsive to it, perhaps cruelly. The ocean gives Kelvin what he wants most (his dead wife) and the gift destroys him because getting what you want is not the same as deserving it. Tarkovsky proved that science fiction's natural subject isn't technology or aliens but the distance between who we are and who we wish we had been.

The Argument Against

The first forty minutes are set on Earth and move with the deliberateness of a legal proceeding. The home-movie footage of Kelvin's past, while thematically essential, extends the setup beyond what most viewers can comfortably endure. At 167 minutes, the film requires patience that it rewards unevenly; some stretches feel meditative while others feel inert. Tarkovsky's disdain for 2001 is visible in the film's refusal to provide spectacle, which can feel like principled austerity or stubborn withholding depending on the day.

Closing Image

Kelvin kneels before his father on what appears to be Earth. Rain falls inside the house. The camera pulls back to reveal that the house is on an island in the Solaris ocean. It's not Earth. It's a gift, or a trap, or both. Kelvin has chosen the copy over the original. The ocean holds him. Whether this is mercy or captivity, the film won't say.