BEFORE: This choice was simple, since George Clooney has been in just two space films, so watching them back-to-back is a must.
THE PLOT: A troubled psychologist is sent to investigate the crew of an isolated research station orbiting a bizarre planet.
AFTER: The initial goal was to collect all the remaining sci-fi films on the list together, but I accidentally caused a secondary theme to develop, which often happens. Nearly all of the last week's films have also been about connecting or re-connecting with family. Which is strange because that's not really a common theme in everyday films, so to see that pop up again and again in space, I have to wonder. Perhaps many sci-fi directors think that the genre is somewhat impersonal and cold (in space, no one can here you bicker...) so the trend lately has been to inject a lot of relationship stuff into sci-fi movies.
We had Tom Cruise's character re-connecting with his past in "Oblivion", young brothers learning how to not fight with each other in "Zathura", a son and his absent father working together in "After Earth", the Robinson family taking on challenges together in "Lost and Space", brothers mind-linking to control giant robots in "Pacific Rim", and even Sandra Bullock's character thinking about her dead daughter while in space in "Gravity". That trend continues tonight in "Solaris", as Clooney's character travels to a distant space station that somehow makes him re-connect with his late wife.
This film is enigmatic for most of its story - it's a long time before we really learn what's going on, and why. In the meantime, our hero seems content to spend time with his wife again, even if he knows deep down that she can't be real. A lot of old memories are dredged up, so the film gets overly flashback-y in the middle, to the point where I almost couldn't tell what was a flashback, what was a dream, and what was happening at the moment.
Once our hero finally resigns himself to the fact that his resurrected wife is not who she seems to be, that's when things get weird. Or I suppose "weirder" is more appropriate. If your favorite part of the film "2001: A Space Odyssey" is that bit at the end that nobody really understands, and you wished it could be turned into a feature-length story of its own, then this is right up your alley. However, as you might expect, that makes it very enigmatic and low on explanations.
There used to be these street tiles in New York, and apparently in other cities, that nobody understood for a while - they'd say things like "Toynbee Idea in Movie 2001 - Resurrect Dead on Planet Jupiter". I don't know about Toynbee, which could be a reference to a historian with that name or could come from a Ray Bradbury story, but I know a LOT about Arthur C. Clarke and the "2001" saga, and I think the person who made the tiles just really misinterpreted them. The monoliths in "2001" were there to shepherd human progress, not resurrecting dead people. Just sayin'.
Also starring Natascha McElhone, Viola Davis (last seen in "The Help"), Jeremy Davies (last seen in "It's Kind of a Funny Story"), Ulrich Tukur
RATING: 5 out of 10 pill bottles
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