I struggle with the timing of watching sequels and remakes relative to the original (ah, okay, the Tarkovsky remake of the original). Sometimes I feel like watching them too closely together can make it hard to judge a remake or sequel on its own merit. At the other end it prevents the cyclical nature of memory from coloring over the actual experience. Anyway I went to bed after watching the original Solaris and woke up, made some toast, and put on the remake. And it’s going to be hard not to compare them anyway.

For a start, the Soderbergh adaptation is more concise, more focused. Tarkovsky made a movie about everything. Soderbergh made a movie about grief. This is probably more in line with the original source material, to which Soderbergh apparently said he’d be sticking more closely too than did Tarkovsky. It also relies heavily on flashback, but it does use this psychologically and cinematically to blur the line between memory and reality, which is an important motif on the theme: we grieve what we remember, not what we forgot, and an instant, let alone a living breathing being, is too big to be captured by memory.

The cinematography felt very basic. The colors and composition are all completely drawn from the palette of American SciFi, dark and grey, with dim but high contrast lighting and occasional swirls of color through observation ports. The music, though there was little of it, was beautiful, but the story was entirely dialogue-driven. The idea of showing over telling was not strongly observed, and as I said flashbacks abound. Very likely it couldn’t have been done showing instead of telling, as it had to rush to reach its conclusion having chopped 70 minutes off of Tarkovsky’s runtime.

Worth a watch, I’d say, especially if you have access to it but not to Tarkovsky’s. Also all the nude shots of Clooney? I understand now why he was considered such a hunk back when I was too young to consider such things. Damn.