Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey vs Tarkovsky's Solaris

i don't really see the relation between the two other than both being space/sci-fi movies. they are both classics, but i prefer 2001 and probably by a wide margin. both kubrick and tarkovsky are two of my favorite directors, so i could watch either one.

It's hard for me to say. I've seen Solaris four or five times, and if someone offered it to me to watch again i'd probably turn them down because it's so long and I've pretty much seen it. I've also read the book, which i think flows better than the film - but i admit that it's not easy to make a film of a book where the protagonist spends most of his free time in the library reading books.

It's also a little disappointing as a film because it almost completely fails to convey what I think Lem was trying to say about the probability that even if there is other life in the universe, there's no reason to believe that we'll ever find it and even if we do no reason to believe that we'll have enough in common as species to even communicate or even entirely recognize each-other as life.

As film nerds go I'm kind of a loser because there are so many i haven't seen. I don't recall having watched any other tarkovsky film, though i keep meaning to.

2001 is more of a high concept film, and works harder to try and dazzle the viewer - but in doing so it almost feels cheap. I haven't read the book.

They both try to approach the idea that the truly alien is perhaps unknowable but in Solaris the problem is that it's impossible to define whether the planet is a being, a hive mind, or some sort of inscrutable amazing machine. In 2001, they took the easier road and made the alien superinteligent and supercompetent, perhaps suggesting a god concept. A weaker approach, imho.

On the other hand, Lem grew up under the soviet regime, and was obviously influenced by the apparent illogic of a nation spending great wealth and effort to search the stars when that wealth and effort was so badly needed on our own planet. He wrote lots of stories about the futility of interstellar travel. Like 'Return from the Stars' where astronauts return from a light-speed journey to some far reach of the universe to find that in the 480 years of normal time that has passed during their journey, almost everybody has forgotten that they even left, nobody is interested in hearing what they discovered, and society has morphed into something foppish and useless that can offer most of them nothing but the opportunity to leave on another long journey.

And Kubrik & Clarke wrote an original story with the intention of making a movie.

Are you talking about the large use of special effects in the film? I assure you that no shot was inserted just for the sake of showing off effects ala Transformers or Avatar etc, each shot has a thematic point, even the shots of the stewards walking in the shuttle to the pen floating in the cabin,

We do not know what it is... I am not sure how you can assume it's an alien, even a competent alien. Is it a being? Or just an entity? How do you know that the star child at the end of the film was looking upon earth with friendly eyes? All of these questions are left up to the viewers imagination.

I have seen both films more times than i can count. I do wish I could have read the books, but have not. I own both the super rare Russian 2 disk and the Criterion remaster. The Russian is dubed in English as I remember with the Criterion subed only in English. The 2001 I own is standard wide screen.

Both movies use a lot of quiet visualized narratives to somehow make the viewer feel the space travel feeling. Symbolized plots that at times really could have two meanings. The main meat of a thread like this could detail every ones thoughts about what the movies are to mean. Thus what I am saying is, if you understand what the movie means it could effect which one you choose. They are both at the edge of comprehensive understanding, which is what is so cool and 70s classic about them.


My choice is Solaris only due to personal feelings. It was a much more dramatic movie for me. I also feel the plot was better. For me I felt that there was a time sequence where not only was the fake people made from the humans memory, but I feel the life form used the earth humans memory to create a whole world for them to live in. This was then stated to me that the planet life form that they went to visit was in reality God. If it was not God then it still had the ability to go inside of the human memory and create people and alternate worlds. For any of you who have read the book correct me if I'm reading too much into the plot. Most people do not notice small things in the beginning that are clues that the world they are in is not real. Later when into the middle of the movie, they do show us more clearly that stuff is not real and that it is from the planet they are on.


2001 as I remember had nothing close to this level of writing. 2001 did have a strange uncanny view of about half of about half of the modern technology wd use today. I do give it points for nailing that stuff. The plots have many more cross over points which makes me want to see them again back to back.

Well, the setup in the book is that Solaris is a planet discovered by astronomers which is orbiting a binary star system in a figure-8.

Mathematicians work out that it's orbit is impossible - that it should have decayed aeons ago.

It turns out that the planet is somehow making course corrections to keep itself in orbit.

Fast forward a generation and they land on the planet to find . . . a vast ocean of some sort of weird plasma and the occasional outcropping of rock. Also mist. Lots of mist.

The ocean on solaris often does utterly inscrutable things. Sometimes it does something just once and never again, sometimes it does similar things at random intervals. For example, sometimes there are eruptions of plasma that harden and form intricate crystalline structures that last for a day or just minutes, and nobody can agree on whether these structures are a natural assembly of the components into shapes or evidence of some sort of design, and at any rate it's very dangerous to get close to them.

And then there's the story related in the film by the pilot.

Fast forward 150 years and humanity has learned almost nothing about solaris. It's formed an entire field of science known as "solaristics" in which nobody agrees with anybody else on anything. Solaristics have even become unfashionable, a futile area of study that most scientists don't even want to talk about anymore.

And recently, it appears that the research station on solaris has stalled. They don't appear to be doing any real 'science' that needs doing in such an expensive place to be, and they are getting strange reports about the scientists working there.

Enter Kelvin the psychiatrist. Kelvin's job is to either find a way to get the scientists healthy and working again, or shut down the station and bring everybody home to earth.

The book doesn't end with a virtual world based on the human's thoughts - it ends with the manifestations ending and the character of the ocean changing. Since they are no longer befuddled by the manifestations of their own subconscious, the scientists come up with some more actual research to do, and Kelvin is to return home having successfully brought the research back on track - but it feels like a failure.

Ok, So I can be wrong on a lot of counts. I do most of my posts in a public place on a cell phone with very little resources other than my own dim-light memory. I remember your script from the narrative of the film. Yes just two or three wild camera tricks have sent my mind wandering into possible plot twists. Maybe someone else on this forum will see the same in Solaris maybe not. Remember it was the most expensive Russian movie ever made at the time. I think it is a work of art anyway. Just the fact that the plot twists could only be my own understanding are ok with me.

Well, you know, the tarkovsky film ends with that aerial shot of the cottage in the mist.

The book ends with kelvin walking out onto an island on solaris, taking off his glove, and sort of shaking hands with the planet. Explains that for some reason if you hold your bare hand (or foot, etc) out to the ocean, it'll reach back up and briefly touch you. Just once. Ever.

So, I think lem is really saying something about the fallacy in the concept of 'alien contact' in most space fiction. He ends the book with kelvin 'making contact' with solaris, but it's not clear that this contact has accomplished anything for either side.

Similarly, Kubrick initially wanted to depict the aliens using people in rubber suits or something, but Sagan (who was consulting) successfully argued that this would be silly, that aliens, if they do exist, probably look nothing like us. So instead he has invisible aliens create that victorian setting to make the humans 'comfortable'.

Both of these scenes are examples of a filmmaker using a crutch. But it's a forgivable crutch, because what else were they supposed to do?

If you watch it from the first opening with that fern like stuff so nicely swaying in the water, with the thought that it is the end, you may see what I am saying. Also at the end they film the planet then switch to earth again. So yes maybe that is all it is. I know in the beginning they start to tell the whole story. So what you are saying is that they are home on Earth, they start to tell the story of the The Solaris Mission and they have been so wonderfully age progressed because they are back on Earth and it is the future? Then the film has a normal time line? I can live with that. Maybe someone who has read the book can fill us in. My way of looking at the plot is much more fun, but may not be the way they made it.

ericj,
So you have read the book. For me that cabin never looked like a real one on Earth. Ha Ha maybe after making the spaceship and spending all the money that was the only Earth cabin prop they could afford. It made me think it was a cabin made by the planet and not on Earth but maybe in the middle of the visiting planet itself, like it had consumed them and made a world for them to live in out of their own minds to make them feel like home.

It's difficult to expect that good sci-fi books will turn into good movies, and those two movies don't really do too much for me.

I would love to see good cinematic versions of stories from Ursula K Le Guin or maybe even Orson Scott Card, however.

I have only seen the remake of Solaris with George Clooney... I much preferred that over 2001...

2001 being exhaggerated well it is a movie first and then Clarke made a book about it. I read the book and that is actually really good and make more sense then the movie it´s based on.

Last movie I watched was Stalker. Amazing atmosphere though somewhere in the middle I got tired and fell asleep.

The movie Solaris is regarded by some to be the greatest Science Fiction movie ever made. I don't know if I would ever say that. It is a real treat if you were looking for something diffefent. In a way it starts very slow, and one of the coolest things is that they are in the county which seems very far from Science Fiction. I read bad reviews about the new one so never saw it. It is hard for me to watch a second rate movie of one I love. The most redeaming factor of this movie is the fact that it is so long and the first part is so slow combined with the fact that the acting is world class, makes you believe that this strange world is real and that it is true. In Science Fiction that is pretty hard to do.

My impression was that the last scene in the tarkovsky film is supposed to represent a simulacrum of kelvin's memories of the cabin, his father, etc. I think they're not intended to look entirely real.

That last scene in the Soderbergh adaptation obviously chose to give the impression that a simulated kelvin went back to earth, or perhaps it was a simulated kelvin on a simulated earth. But by that point soderbergh had lost me. That scene where Gordon loses control of her bowels and shouts "It's Not Human, And I'm Not OK With That!" terminated my patience with the film quite abruptly. If I'd been in a theater i would have been wrestled out by the ushers because, at home, I was literally shouting at the tv for being too stupid for words. I may have thrown things, too. Worse than that ape lincoln twist at the end of the 'planet of the apes' remake. Soderbergh owes me two hours of my life, but he'll have to get in line behind Sam Raimi's pennance for the 45 minutes of montage in Spiderman III.

And yet Lem said he liked the soderbergh adaptation. I think authors are frequently more flexible with their ideas than their fans.

Yeah, I read the book and liked it, though it moves kinda
slow, and it's a big thick book.

I've read a lot of Lem. I wouldn't recommend starting with Solaris unless you've already got a lot of hard-to-read books under your belt. Otherwise, start with Star Diaries aka Memoirs of a Space Traveler. Or pick up a copy of "Mortal Engines" for a collection of short stories.

My impression was that the last scene in the tarkovsky film is supposed to represent a simulacrum of kelvin's memories of the cabin, his father, etc. I think they're not intended to look entirely real.

That last scene in the Soderbergh adaptation obviously chose to give the impression that a simulated kelvin went back to earth, or perhaps it was a simulated kelvin on a simulated earth. But by that point soderbergh had lost me. That scene where Gordon loses control of her bowels and shouts "It's Not Human, And I'm Not OK With That!" terminated my patience with the film quite abruptly. If I'd been in a theater i would have been wrestled out by the ushers because, at home, I was literally shouting at the tv for being too stupid for words. I may have thrown things, too. Worse than that ape lincoln twist at the end of the 'planet of the apes' remake. Soderbergh owes me two hours of my life, but he'll have to get in line behind Sam Raimi's pennance for the 45 minutes of montage in Spiderman.

I have been known for an over active imagination and when you put that together with film which already have imagination sometimes things happen. I agree that they wanted to show his memory. That is the most easy and upfront thing to believe. But if he wanted us to note that it was a synthetic world made by the planet then he would have placed strange things that do not look right, like the dress she was wearing. Just little things to show you it is all not real. Do you think those little clues are in the start of Solaris? I have looked and thought I saw things. I don't know, just guessing?