Solaris (1972 Film) - Reception and Legacy

Reception and Legacy

Solaris premiered at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival and won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury and was nominated for the Palme d'Or. In the USSR, the film premiered in the Mir film theater in Moscow on 5 February 1973. Tarkovsky did not consider the Mir cinema the best projection venue. Despite the film's narrow release in only five film theaters in the USSR, the film nevertheless sold 10.5 million tickets. Unlike the vast majority of commercial and ideological films in the 1970s, Solaris was screened in the USSR in limited runs for 15 years without any breaks, giving it cult status. In the Eastern Bloc and in the West, Solaris premiered later. In the United States, a version of Solaris that was truncated by 30 minutes premiered at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York City on 6 October 1976.

Although Stanisław Lem worked with Tarkovsky and Friedrich Gorenstein in developing the screenplay, Lem maintained that he "never really liked Tarkovsky’s version” of his novel. Tarkovsky wanted a film story based on the novel but artistically independent of its origin. However, Lem opposed any divergence of the screenplay from the novel. Tarkovsky claimed that Lem did not fully appreciate cinema and that he expected the film to merely illustrate the novel without creating an original cinematic piece. Tarkovsky’s film is about the inner lives of its scientists as human beings. Lem’s novel is about the conflicts of man’s condition in nature and the nature of man in the universe. For Tarkovsky, Lem's exposition of that existential conflict was the starting point for describing the inner lives of the characters.

In the autobiographical documentary Voyage in Time (1983), Tarkovsky says he viewed Solaris as an artistic failure because his film did not transcend genre as he believed his film Stalker (1979) did due to the required technological dialogue and special effects. M. Galina in the 1997 article Identifying Fears called this film "one of the biggest events in the Soviet science fiction cinema" and one of the few works that does not seem anachronistic nowadays.

A list of "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" compiled by Empire magazine in 2010 ranked Tarkovsky's Solaris at #68. In 2002, Steven Soderbergh wrote and directed an American adaptation of Solaris, which starred George Clooney.

Salman Rushdie calls Solaris "a sci-fi masterpiece", and has urged that "This exploration of the unreliability of reality and the power of the human unconscious, this great examination of the limits of rationalism and the perverse power of even the most ill-fated love, needs to be seen as widely as possible before it's transformed by Steven Soderbergh and James Cameron into what they ludicrously threaten will be '2001 meets Last Tango in Paris.' What, sex in space with floating butter? Tarkovsky must be turning over in his grave."

Nimród Antal cites Solaris as one of the influences on the making of his first movie, Kontroll. Kontroll has many similarities with Solaris, such as the ambiguity of reality and the hallucinatory look.

Film critic Roger Ebert compared "Solaris" with the 2011 film Another Earth by noting that Another Earth "is as thought-provoking, in a less profound way, than Tarkovsky's Solaris, another film about a sort of parallel Earth."