2002 / 99 Minutes / PG-13
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz

There is a song by the Talking Heads called “Heaven”, in which they say that “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens”. This lyric occurred to me quite a bit as I endured a recent viewing of Steven Soderbergh’s “Solaris”.

It isn’t that “Solaris” is a bad movie. It’s not really bad. But I can’t really think of anything that makes it that good of a movie either. “Solaris” is, I sort of think, the story of man who has recently lost his wife. I guess this guy (George Clooney) is an astronaut. Or, at least, was an astronaut somewhere along the line. He sits around, mourning the loss of his wife (which, it seems, can be a full-time job if you are a character in a movie, seeing as how he doesn’t seem to do anything else) until one day when he receives a message from a buddy. This buddy is on a spaceship orbiting the planet of Solaris. He informs George that George has to come right up to the spaceship and check out what is happening.

It is there that the film takes a turn for the fantastic and, also, for the utterly mind-boggling. George arrives on the spaceship to find a lot of bloodstains, a crazed astronaut whose manner of talking reminded me of Lumberg in the film “Office Space”, and, of all things, his dead wife. The wife is walking around, talking and getting him to fall in love with her all over again. Ah, but is this really his wife? Is it her spirit? Is it just an illusion? And, most importantly, what the hell is going on? You see, it was shortly after this development that I stopped caring and stopped being able to follow the film. I get it that his wife is showing up and he starts falling for her all over again, okay, I get that part. But once that is established, nothing else seems to happen. The movie grows sluggish. It just sits there and does nothing. I guess it’s about the nature of dreams and reality and the idea of heaven and about letting go and about loss and blah blah blah blah. But it doesn’t seem to do anything with these notions. It establishes that it is about these ideas, but it doesn’t seem to explore them at all. It doesn’t build, it doesn’t progress, it just treads water.

All the other critics I have heard from seem to like it, so maybe I am missing something. I probably am. All I know is that I almost fell asleep on at least four different occasions during the film. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think that’s a good thing. I was monumentally bored by the whole enterprise. The characters were so dull, so excruciatingly dull. They did not spark my interest. The plot didn’t seem to exist. The philosophy was nice and all, but without anything else to hang the film on, it got old rather quickly. After watching “Solaris”, I felt as though I had taken a nap for about two hours. I was groggy and frustrated and a little confused. I hate that feeling, and I hate any movie that fosters such a feeling. Therefore, “Solaris” was not my cup of tea. It was pretty and all, but I’ll take “2001″ any day.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 27th, 2002 at 3:13 pm and is filed under Dale's Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.