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Solaris is a very good film, maybe one of the best science fiction films of all time, but not one that you should watch if you’re in the mood for a summer blockbuster type film. It is interesting and it is beautiful with its share of tense moments, but as for aliens or space guns, well, hardly any. I am quite taken by this film because it is ultimately one in which the setting and the plot are secondary to the drama within the characters. As a lifelong fan of science fiction I am delighted to discover a serious effort that is unabashedly serious and more than just competent in fulfilling its ambitions.

Loosely based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem, Solaris is in brief the story of an encounter between Russian space explorers and alien life. They think. The question of whether the phenomena they encounter on their space station orbiting the first extra solar planet man has come in contact with is one of the major elements of the film. More important than that though is the film’s examination of the relationships between the characters and their pasts. The film opens with Kris Kelvin meeting a former member of the Solaris project at his father’s cabin. These early scenes are highly reminiscent of the work of Ingmar Bergman in that Tarkovsky uses long takes as Kelvin walks around the property and not much is seen to happen. Slowly there is a build up of tension but it is more of a shared tension with nature rather than the expectation that anything in particular might happen. Considering the very limited amount of film he was allotted with which to make the film, it is amazing that he had the patience and discipline to use his precious footage in this manner. Long takes that are mostly intended to set up a contrast between Earth and the space station.

The meeting between the former member of project Solaris and Kelvin does not go well but it is the first demonstration of several key elements of the film. It shows clearly that the narrative will be unreliable in many respects, and it shows that our hero is not very heroic in many ways. Kelvin is a psychiatrist and he is going to the Solaris station the next day to decide whether the project should be closed down or not. The booklet that comes with the Criterion Collection release of Solaris describes Donatas Banionis who plays Kelvin as “a Russian Glen Ford”. It really is an apt comparison. Kelvin comes across as a flawed, rumpled, semi-hero who would not have been out of place in “3:10 to Yuma”.

Perhaps most interestingly the early part of the film shows a picture of Soviet bureaucracy that is both less and more flattering than I expected. Less so because the film itself did have to pass censorship by the soviet bureaucracy and I would have expected the representation of members of their space agency to be highly sanitized and full bore heroic; more flattering in that despite the image of red tape and results oriented thinking the bureaucrats in charge of project Solaris nevertheless gives a full hearing to a man who is on the face of it completely full of crap. The same scene in an American film would probably have ended in the poor fellow being shot.

The scenes that take place on the space station inevitably invite comparisons to 2001: a Space Odyssey. Reportedly one of the most expensive films ever made in the Soviet Union, Solaris possesses one of the most authentic and believable space sets ever committed to film. But it isn’t a pretty and sanitized set. The space station in Solaris ahs been lived in and allowed to go to seed in places. The French cartoonist Moebius (who was one of the set designers on the Ridley Scott’s Alien) is well known for futuristic settings that are nevertheless covered in graffiti and fantastic cityscapes that nevertheless contain garbage trucks, Solaris’s space station fits in nicely in that milieu.

The story proper that unfolds on the station is not one that can be talked about much without ruining the film. I’ll just say that the effects of loneliness and our responsibility to and for others are subjects that get juggled about gracefully but with force, and though the ending almost by definition cannot be entirely satisfying, it is nevertheless, emotionally and dramatically valid

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