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Jun 09, 2016hesselugano rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
Poor Andrei! When author Stanislaw Lem saw this film he hated it and scathingly criticized everything about it. Given the budgetary and other restrictions under which Tarkovskii had to work, I consider it a masterpiece. Tarkovskii himself regarded Solaris as his least successful film, but never explained exactly why he felt that way. In the early 1970's the original subtitled cinema release was withdrawn and replaced by an absolutely awful version overdubbed in English by some language institute in Paris. At the time of this writing (July 2017) a newly restored copy of the film is available to art-house theaters. The worst insult Solaris suffered was when Steven Soderberg decided to do a remake. At first I was enthused with the idea of a new director taking advantage of CGI and a more substantial budget, because Lem's mimoids, symmetriads, asymmetriads and other phenomena of the planet Solaris would present an amazing challenge for modern state-of-the-art film making and special effects technology. Alas, Soderberg produced a muddled and uninspired mess. (On it's release I recall a well known female film critic who quipped "the only thing worth seeing in this movie was George Clooney's gorgeous naked butt".