DonaldB
Supporting Actor
- Joined
- Mar 30, 2000
- Messages
- 763
That's a moot question because Soderbergh hasn't the wherewithal to pull off anything as profound as Tarkovsky could. The man is at best a craftsman, not an artist.
My Kelvin decides to stay on the planet without any hope whatsoever while Tarkovsky created an image where some kind of an island appears, and on that island a hut. And when I hear about the hut and the island I'm beside myself with irritation... This is just some emotional sauce into which Tarkovsky has submerged his heroes, not to mention that he has completely amputated the scientific landscape and in its place introduced so much of the weirdness I cannot stand.(BTW, I'm getting these quotes from the website www.nostalghia.com, the finest Tarkovsky resource on the web.)
In Lem's defense, he apparently had no idea what the "hut" is in reference to (nor, it seems, that Kelvin's "father" is in there). He claims to have read the script, but apparently saw no more than 20 minutes of the finished film.
But, back to the original topic, I think Soderbergh can make a great film of this novel. I'm not nearly as excited by James Cameron's presence and each of the movies you mention in his defense strike me as being far less than the originals. The original "Terminator" still stands up whereas "T2" strikes me as just so much production-line silliness, all lame one-liners and bad child acting - the "McBane/Rainer Wolfcastle" version of "Terminator"; "Aliens" simply never had a thing on "Alien", and gets creakier by the year; "Titanic" ripped off everything that was good about it from "A Night to Remember", and then added all the groan-inducing cliches that brought in the 13 yr old girls in droves.
"Solaris", if done right, should be like kryptonite to 13 year old girls.