Solaris

What happens when you mix Tarkovsky with 70s sci-fi? Apparently, exactly what it sounds like. To me, it felt like oil and water.

Tarkovsky is often a difficult filmmaker, with movies that can either alienate or cut to the quick. But, having been so deeply moved by The Sacrifice, Nostalgia, and Stalker, I was braced for something more than what I got.

I wanted so badly for this to contain the same piercing, mystic insightfulness as Tarkovsky's other works. But every time I thought "Yes! There's what I've been waiting for!" it would dwindle back to ramshackle space station interiors, painfully dated costume design, and (surprisingly) predictable story beats. 

I feel this disappointment most strikingly in the imagery. Tarkovsky's ever-present intuition for poetic images is seen in the undulating underwater reeds of the opening--only to be replaced by generic, artificially colored, and ultimately lifeless images of the Solaris Ocean later on.

Is it truly a bad film? No. But its grasps toward trademark Tarkovsky transcendence only serve to outline my dissatisfaction with how far it falls short of what it could be.