|
|
|
solaris
Prometheus crew members Jeremy Davies and Viola Davis |
All of which suited Soderbergh. “I hadn’t ever come near sci-fi before, mostly because the hardware aspects of the genre don’t really interest me,” he says. “I’m not interested in making a film about what technology is going to be like a few decades from now.”
|
“THIS IS SCIENCE FICTION THE WAY
SCIENCE FICTION USED TO BE BACK
IN THE FIFTIES AND SIXTIES, WHEN IT WAS A FICTION OF IDEAS, A FICTION OF PEOPLE”
|
Which is not to say that Solaris - set aboard a space station whose crew have abruptly broken off communication with Earth and seem to be threatened by some mysterious force - is not both scary and exciting. As one would expect from the producer - Titanic director James Cameron, who very definitely has had prior experience of sci-fi - the film dramatises the dilemma of the crew of space station Prometheus in a direct and enthralling way.
“Jim knows narrative backwards and forwards,” says Soderbergh respectfully. “He really understands how to set up and pay off a story. I would meet with him about Solaris and we would have three-hour conversations about the story, about technology, about what the future is going to be like, about space travel, and issues like isolation and sensory deprivation, because he’s studied all of it. I would tape our conversations and transcribe them and highlight things that I thought could find their way into the film, whether it was a sentence or an idea – anything I thought might stick.”
Even so, as Cameron is the first to insist, “This is not an action film and people need to know that going in. This is science fiction the way science fiction used to be back in the fifties and sixties, when it was a fiction of ideas, a fiction of people.”
The idea that threatens the people on board Prometheus emanates from the strange planet of Solaris, which they are in space to study. A constantly changing world which appears to have an intelligence of its own, the planet also seems to know more about the crew than they do themselves. Tapping into their deepest-seated concerns, it recreates them and gives them - or appears to give them - the chance to relive and reshape key moments in their past lives.
Dr Chris Kelvin (played by George Clooney) is sent to the Prometheus to sort things out after an appeal from the mission’s previous leader, Gibarian (German actor Ulrich Tukur), an old friend of Kelvin’s. But when he arrives on Prometheus, Kelvin finds that Gibarian has committed suicide and that the two remaining crew members - Snow (Jeremy Davies) and Gordon (Viola Davies) - are exhibiting signs of major stress. Before long Kelvin, too, begins to feel the pull of Solaris, as it enables him to revisit his own past and confront the most painful episode in it: the suicide of his wife, Rheya (Natascha McElhone).
“From the moment Kelvin enters the space station, you know that there is great jeopardy there,” says Cameron. “You don’t understand the nature of the danger right away: you think that it could be anything - there could be a monster there, a murderer. It turns out the jeopardy is to one’s sanity. This film takes you to the farthest reaches of the universe, and what you find there is yourself. Kelvin is confronted with his own memory, a replay of the things he’s gone through, his guilt, his culpability, the mistakes that he made. And he gets the opportunity to change it - or maybe not.”
|
|
