Oh, Those whacky Russians and their funky 70s sci-fi! Less of the Sci, more of the Fi. Kinda slow. Kinda obscure. Kinda monochromatic. But not always! Kindsa keeps you guessin when you gonna get some colors! Their space-flyin is definitely on a different level here, too!
We start with a mustache-less Russian Charles Bronson, so morose as he wanders the quiet solitude of the countryside by a nearby house. A Visitor comes. There’s astronaut plots. The planet Solaris they’ve been observing for years now. A potentially sentient ocean? I dunno. This shit’s weird. It’s like a cross between 2001 and Eraserhead. Reality is not certain. The station above Solaris is left with 3 squirrely astronaut-types. Well, maybe 2. Well, maybe, who the fuck knows. There’s a mad midget somehow involved and it’s just overall very unsettling as space ghosts and symbiotic matrixes get involved.
I can’t say I understand what’s really taking place here. There’s some odd psychological kinda stuff, maybe some Oedipal thing but I’m not exactly positive on that one. It’s a bit of a fever dream kind of scenario as we watch Kris, the psychologist astronaut walk into a new world of surreal realities and emotion and communications with an alien world. It’s shot well. Somewhat unconventional storytelling based on the book by Stanislaw Lem, who has introduced some early SF concepts of Matrix-like Virtual Reality and A.I. interactions in his other writings. But yeah, this one’s maybe one of those movies better watched under the DMR Alternate Substance clause, that involves a “water pipe” or some fungi. While the framework of the story is relatively straight forward, It’s pretty fuckin out there.
