Almost forgot SOLARIS

[Remo D]

...and I'm sure it's already flopped its way out of any theatre near you. But just in case--

Talk about a losing proposition! We're going to take a heavy, weighty, lengthy, talky philosophical Soviet science fiction epic (based on a novel, not a comic book, okay?)--we're going to boil it down to about ninety minutes, we're going to put George Clooney in it, and we'll get people interested in it by fighting for a PG-13 rating even though he shows his ass a couple of times.

Here's the catch--SOLARIS is still virtually all talk, and no attempt to sell it to mainstream sci-fi audiences during the holiday season was going to work. Oh, sure, there are a couple of effects, but there's NO action. Now, I'm not going to say that there's something WRONG with that--I can certainly handle the concept--but there's no way you're going to win the Top Ten audience with that, is there? SOLARIS was meant for the arthouses.

Ah, but there already WAS a SOLARIS in the arthouses. Longer, weightier, and Soviet, remember? This was supposedly an attempt to make it mainstream. So even though it's well acted and thoughtful, it's not as effective as the original.

In short, by the time SOLARIS really kicks in (and it does), and you're truly caught up in the moral battle regarding just what to do with flesh-and-blood phantoms that intrude into reality... well, then the damn thing's practically over.

What was that Aesop's Fable about trying to please everybody, again?

[Darth Tanner]

Flopped indeed! This one barely lasted three weeks in my neck of the woods. I didn't even bother to see this since it didn't really interest me that much. But a friend of mine saw it and said it really wasn't worth seeing. Like most movies that came out this year, I'll probably end up renting this on video if I decide to see it. Is it just me or does anyone else here think that 2002 was an all-around disappointing year for movies?