Solaris (2002)
She's no Natalya Bonderchuk, but what are ya going to do?
dir: Steven Soderbergh
2002
It takes a fair-sized pair of brass balls to remake a sci-fi film “classic” considered a classic by people with beards who smoke pipes. Either that, or just plain hubris wrapped up in a blanket of arrogance with a side helping of laziness.
Sometimes it works out well, usually it’s just disastrous. The list of remakes gone wrong in ratio with the ones that succeed is tremendously large. It’s something akin to 100,000 to 7. Those remakes that worked out well were War of the Worlds, The Fly, The Thing and maybe Scarface with Pacino. And maybe one of the Deep Throat remakes. Almost every other remake has, to use the official cinema studies term, sucked dog’s balls.
It’s true. The Pope agrees. Remakes work out bad even when they’re okay, because the viewer still tells themselves “eh, even if it’s passable, why should I watch this instead of the original ever again?”
Often the remake is so wretched that it causes audiences to bay for the director’s blood. Gus Van Sant was roundly ridiculed for remaking Psycho, allegedly shot-for-shot (it’s nothing of the sort), and that recent Wicker Man has made the director, Neil LaButte, and not its invincible star Nicolas Cage, something of a laughingstock.
Rarely does the remake surpass the original. This instance, with Soderbergh’s ambitious remake of the original 1972 Russian film by Andrei Tarkovsky, I humbly submit is one of them.
Sure, the original Solaris is complex and highly intellectual, and has reams and reams of purple prose exegesis written about it. But for my money it fails at what films are primarily supposed to succeed at, which is to be watchable. It might be brilliant and ever so transcendent, but that’s all stuff you’re told away from the actual screen, afterwards, by people trying to convince you that it’s great and you’re just not smart enough to get it. As a film, as something you actually sit there and watch for three hours, it’s a fucking chore.
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