Keanen's Film Blog

This 2-hour 40-minute Soviet sci-fi art film is one of the slowest movies ever made. I know people say that about 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) but Solaris really takes the cake.

Is it better than the George Clooney version? Yes. Is it a fun watch for a modern audience? Well… It’s not until the second act that we go to space, we learn that the protagonist is a psychologist, and the camera starts moving a bit. The first 45 minutes or so are a waste of time, and it never really ramps up. So is it a fun watch? No.

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The title is terrible, and the source material is about as niche as it gets. I won’t deny that I am a fan of the source material, nor will I deny that I volunteered on the film’s massive VFX team. I found that environment overly formal and pretentious, like we were supposed to be making a real movie. I won’t assign blame to the VFX supervisor, who was only doing what he felt was best for his own career and the visual professionalism of the film.

But that’s the problem, isn’t it? AVGN was never Hollywood. It was a postmodernist gross-out series that made juvenile jabs at old video games, and that’s what everybody loved. Try to dress that up in a fresh coat of paint and you get something false.

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I try to avoid talking about over-hyped films, not because I hate those films but because the conversation there is overcrowded. A couple of masterpieces came out last year that I won’t talk about for that reason. For other reasons, I don’t have much to talk about with the films of this year. I can talk about the politics of the situation, but not the films because I haven’t seen any.

So let’s go back a few years to a film that I inevitably must tear into sooner or later. I have genuine difficulty saying negative things about films due to my appreciation of the medium, and I only really hate the ones that are both terrible and profitable. Eragon was fraud on a grand scale.

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