Solaris

Awhile back I was invited to a science fiction film and movie festival. Being in a good mood at the time I accepted the invite.

As I prepared to sit down in a theater showing George's Pal "The Time Machine" a critic for a weekly news and arts publication saw me and hurried over to say hello.

We exchanged pleasantries and he blurted out that he was surpried to see me at the festival.

Oh, I replied. Why's that?

Because you hate science fiction, he said, before hurrying off to say hello to a big-breasted woman, who had aspirations of being a movie reviewer.

Interesting.

For the record: I do not hate science fiction, regardless of the form it may take. I happen to like science fiction very much. In fact, a large section of my personal library is given over to literature and films and movies that are undeniably science fiction.

What I don't like, what I--for lack of a better term--hate is 'sci fi': Genre writing or film- or movie-making that is whored up to appear, albeit superifically, to be science fiction. You know of what I speak, don't you? I don't have give specifics, do I?

I dislike such efforts because they are, from step one, fraud and I hate fraud.

Which may go to explain why I didn't like "Solaris" when I should have liked it. It was, after all, science fiction.

Albeit superficially.

If that.

Wait. Maybe that was why I didn't like it.

"Solaris" is the story of a planet that reads minds and gives those whose minds have been read what they want in the form of people they have lost or miss from having in their regular lives. An interesting premise, this, and one readily presented in the novel by Stanislaw Lem, and, later, (1972?) by Andrei Tarkovsky, as a film.

And now, again, as a film by Steven Soderbergh.

Here's the thing: Lem and Tarkovsky understood science fiction and what it entails to succeed. Soderbergh fails, for whatever the reasons, to have this understanding, and, as a result, makes a movie that is not science fiction but, merely, sci-fi.

Interesting. Very interesting.

All the elements necessary for a solid science fiction work are here, but director Soderbergh is much too busy being director, cinematographer, and editor to be bothered or burdened with the little stuff. Which means, sadly, the resulting work is drivel.

But I digress.

As I was saying: This is the story of a planet that reads the minds of those within its reach and gives them what they want in the form of a person they have lost or are missing. In other words: Careful what you ask for, because you can get it, at least here.

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