Solaris.

It's not like I watch Tarkovsky all the time. Before rewatching Solaris recently, because a friend was interested in seeing it, I warned, "It's a film some might term 'slow moving.'" We all settled in for 2hr30+min of what exactly I couldn't remember. It'd been over five years since I last watched the movie. I remember calling it my favorite for months afterward. I falsely remembered long, slow-panning nature shots (they do exist, but my mind had sentimentally multiplied the frequency and duration). I had an inaccurate conception of the sequence of the narrative. I settled in with patience and skepticism. Everyone was going to hate it, and their antipathy was going to infect me.

You see there's about a thousand quicker, more aggressive and immediate genre films between me July 20 2009 and Solaris appx. Jan 2004. There was Stuart Gordan's From Beyond in the same week (an excellent, excellent sci-fi horror film that Lord willing I'll talk about next), the same crowd present. What would this film have on eye-socket-brain-sucking (how about islands of thought generated dream habitats suspended in a jelly-like color-shifting thought-producing and sentient extraterrestrial oceanworld? OK)?

I'm not attempting to correct the perception that Solaris is a boring and heady sci-fi film. I'm asking, does that criticism exist? It shouldn't.

Tarkovsky treats the camera as total consciousness, mental and physical. Sometimes he moves the camera and the actors in a synchronized, choreographed manner that is both deliberate and instinctual, that both stages the drama and intensifies the psychology. The psychology, by the way, is what drives Solaris, beginning to end, shot to shot, and all characters, events, and situations fortify the otherworldly-parallel ideology of the film. It earns its weirdness, its fiction, its mindwarp.

When I speak of the camera as deliberate, I also mean crisp, precise, and consistent. Solaris is one terrifying, suspenseful moment stretched across a lengthy running time. It's paralyzing. For example, the film begins with a warning, a description of a past bizarre encounter in Solaris. It's a a white-knuckle meeting between scientists, business men, and a pilot. The pilot is issuing a warning. The pilot, in the present, is sharing the story with a family. One member of the family is about to visit Solaris. He's going to make a decision about the fate of Solaris. Immediately afterward the man leaves for Solaris. This is our introduction, our context.

That's a great fucking set up. You don't even feel set up though, so meticulous and tenacious is Tarkovsky. So smooth is his narrative. So casual and mental is his camera. What is actually the story of a caged man, a kind of intellectual sci-fi prison story, is delivered with complete solemnity. Tarkovsky shows a video of clouds; fog in changing colors. His scientist enters Solaris without doubt, and his mission is to disprove the illogical.

Tarkvosky's own logic, in camera and narrative presence, is the counterpoint to the sensationalism of the story, and what keeps it from becoming too fantastic. The intrinsic anxiety and paranoia, present in every shot, and pulsing beneath every scene (this ship, forlorn and doomed, possesses a genuine eeriness), is kept bubbling beneath the surface. Tarkovsky's refusal to bring it to the surface is his great advantage.

The tranquility of the 'guests' and their disturbances is a feature of the story's impartiality. What functions as a movie-monster in Solaris is a living dead ex-wife who possesses all the qualities of the corporeal. She (the ex-wife in particular) has physicality. She has memory. She has tenderness, sensitivity, and reason. She defends herself. She fears for the protagonist. She is voluntarily self-critical and self-effacing. She's meant to pose a questionable threat to the protagonist.

It's great to see an old favorite and appreciate it in a whole new way. Because aside from being a great and beautiful movie from one of the all-time great filmmakers, I can now appreciate Solaris as a truly fantastic genre film as well. It expertly manipulates the audience in all the vital sci-fi ways, and, importantly, it has a clear, understandable question as its center, eloquently introduced by another scientist in the film when he asserts, "In the search for truth, man is condemned to knowledge." The question is, what is the ultimate value of that truth, and what role does it play in our life and in our happiness? Solaris attempts to articulate the meaning of the question and provide some kind of answer.