Solaris

[Eternal]

I have seen the movie only recently, and I really enjoyed it. The movie brings up some interesting questions, but I doubt it would be classified as an "Objectivist" movie, because the main character commits suicide at the very end.

Edited November 17, 2005 by Eternal

[dondigitalia]

I haven't seen Solaris, but it would depend a lot on the context of the suicide. Have you read We the Living? Suicide and/or walking into a situation of certain death can sometimes (rarely, under very extreme circumstances) be the morally proper thing to do.

[Ariana Binetta]

Outstanding movie! Eerie, atmospheric, and beautiful. It does feature murder and suicide, but maybe if the various characters had had an Objectivist sense of self-discipline and rationality they could have handled the various strange goings-on better. The existential reward at the end, you know, was potentially great. A brilliant and thought-provoking film!

[Lemuel]

Artistically, Solaris was a great film ... I agree with Ariana here. I actually enjoy putting the DVD in and letting the menu screen (exterior shots of the station & Solaris) silently run for hours on end like some kind of screen saver.

The message I took from Solaris is more exposed in the book than in the film. It seemed to me that Stanislaw Lem's theme was something like: not only do we not know everthing in the universe, but perhaps there are things we can't know ... perhaps love is one of them. The planet or star, or whatever Solaris was, was an allegory for Kelvin's (Clooney) relationship with the mysterious and unreadable Rhea (McElhone).

As far as specific Objectivist-oriented themes, I find few.

There's the mystic love-at-first-sight scenario. Rhea admitted she wasn't exactly the picture of mental health ... why was Kelvin continually attracted to her, then? When Rhea began withdrawing from Kelvin, he did try to reach her, but as a psychiatrist he should have known a way to help her (or get a colleague involved). He's a man who took on a charity, rather than fall in love with a heroine, which (given that he was a psychiatrist) lead me to question his mental health. (Would you have enjoyed an indication in The Fountainhead that Roark was unskilled? Like, he didn't bomb Cordlandt, but his resort slid into the valley?)

So, at Solaris, an entity from which one's fears and strongest emotions are manifest in physical form (an acceptable literary/allegorical idiom), Kelvin - knowing Rhea is dead, consciously aware that this construct is not "real" - falls in love with her again! Again he walks headlong into the phychosis of his marriage, and is unable to save his own life when Solaris' expansion threatens the station.

If there's a hero in the film, it's Gordon (Viola Davis). She realizes Solaris can be a threat, needs to be looked at by someone else, that the avatars are as intense as their principles, and that Kelvin (and Gibaran before him) were out of touch with reality, incapable of acting on what they knew was real. (I can't recall at the moment if Lem's [male] Gordon left the station in the novel, or stayed cooped up in his quarters.)

Good written prose, great film, absolutely beautiful, well-acted, and Natasha McElhone is about the sexiest thing since Cleopatra. I just wish Kelvin had been a hero rather than a victim, or that the story was about Gordon's triumph over abusive illusions. That we're left, in the end, with ghosts and barely answerable questions about Solaris says a lot.

[Ariana Binetta]

Very thoughtful comments, Synthlord! A pleasure to read.

And, yes, Rhea was very annoying. But George Clooney was an absolute doll! :-) His effort to understand McElhone was nothing but valliant. Love makes you do these things...

What I took away from the film is that life is potentially much more rich than people realize. The possibilities with science, and new environments and species, is great. How wonderful is it to get a chance to recreate life and get a second chance?! I think the mistake everyone made was not to realize that once a new life was created, it instantly became independent and new. All should have treated it as such. Rhea and Kelvin both errored here.

But a wonderfully photographed movie with a full heart--and terrific food for thought!

[Eternal]

For me - the interesting theme was about the second chance, the opportunity for redemption, which was ultimately wasted. If you were ever in a bumpy relationship, where you have loved and lost - only to find again... well - from personal experience, at least, that 'finding again' can be very elusive, if even at all possible. I think the movie perfectly captured that fragile aspect of love.