Andrei Tarkovsky’s meditative, deeply humanistic Solaris stands as an answer to Stanley Kubrick’s mechanical 2001: A Space Odyssey in the way it pushes the scientific intrigues of its subject matter to the background, bringing the characters and their internal human drama to the forefront. Tarkovsky’s overlong, indulgent treatise on humanism within the science fiction realm treats its characters with loving graces and spends so much time with them that the sci-fi artifice that surrounds them seems almost inconsequential.
A Film Log 