Solaris raises interesting questions, and then it answers them before it dares let an audience do anything as dangerous as think for itself. There are long, dull passages of dialog that don’t illuminate the issues. Instead they lay them out like a textbook.
The story starts slower than a 400 meter race at the Special Olympics. You sort of want to shake the participants and yell “Go that way and speed it up!”
It shows us two things. One, that it is damn near impossible to avoid the lessons our parents taught us, no matter how fucked-up they are. Two, it teaches us that Coburn became an asshole through the same process and probably against his will.
The plot, which hit us in drab greasy blobs of expository dialog is some goth kid’s wet dream about cloning and a perfect society collapsing because the clones are beginning to remember past lives, and some asshole who wants to live forever killing off women who get pregnant because that means no clones.
It’s better written and deeper than I expected, and it feels pretty damn real and sincere up until it’s last thirty minutes.
I wanted more chasing and crimes, to see how the kid did it. But Spielberg thinks a character can’t sneeze without some corny backstory to explain it.
Adaptation is a movie that people in Starbucks would probably call “meta” something, without really knowing exactly what that means. Fuck knows I don’t.
