|
|
Time to watch Solaris! What's it about? Not really sure. Why am I watching it? Well, I don't have enough of a CS backlog to get through the binge of TV shows I have coming down the Netflix pipe and needed to bump something up. How did it end up in there in the first place? I'm not totally sure. Maybe someone suggested it, maybe I decided to trust random recommendations, maybe I just misclicked something. Really, I'm going in totally blind here. We clearly seem to have a sci-fi movie here, and it really is not starting like some splashy action movie, so either it's space-horror, which there really just isn't enough of, or it's one of those low-key sorta deals. I'm leaning towards horror. Anyway, yeah, we've got George Clooney here, being asked by The Company to go investigate some vague weirdness and lack of communication on the planet Solaris. OK, yeah, this is under-done Space Horror. To what degree will this turn out to be the exact same movie as Event Horizon? Let's find out!
OK, Curious George arrives via freezer ship at the ship that was sent out to investigate mysterious goings-on on Solaris. There's bloody hand prints all over it. Not the best sign. There's half-thawed dead guys in the cryo-freezer, not a good sign. There's some crazy guy screaming down the hallway, not a good sign. There's... hip-hop circus music, being listened to by a reasonably sane looking young slacker type. After some brief introductions, George asks "Uh... why is there blood everywhere?" Slacky is rather distressingly blase about what's up. Someone freaked out and were gunned down, someone killed himself, someone locked herself in a lab and refuses to come out, and both Slacker and Shut-In explain that yeah, there is something Weird going on, but without first hand experience, you can't really explain what the deal is. Shrugging and moving on, we find some little kid running around for no good reason.
|
OK, right now, I have to say, this movie is SO AN ADVENTURE GAME. We have a character with very little established about him wandering around a big generally quiet space ship. There are some other characters who will talk plenty but don't want to give much up sitting around in fixed locations. The main character wanders about, checks things out, then backtracks and talks to the other characters, asking them a lot of questions about what he's seen. I am officially running with the theory that this script was originally planned for use in a graphic adventure, and if I see anything remotely approaching a puzzle, that'll be considered absolute proof of the fact. Anyway, eventually George exhausts all the dialog trees, so he decides to get some sleep. While he sleeps, we get the camera flipping back and forth between him sleeping, the local mysterious planet being all blue and purple and glowy, and a flashback to him riding around on a train and following some girl around to parties and such. By the way, this movie has some pretty long stretches of just showing things floating around in space, or people slowly plodding down hallways. More evidence of this really being a game. Anyway, this here flashback would appear to be a keeper. For some reason, George and, I'm going to say George's dead wife, because that's how this works, are talking in this flashback, but their mouths aren't moving. So I guess we have the audio from a different flashback going here, or they're psychic, or there's just some crazy dream logic going on here. Probably the first one.
We then skip forward in out flashback to a sex scene or two, which fail to call forth boobs-by-paragraph-3 and instead give us a lot of George Clooney's butt. Eventually, he wakes up, and... here's his wife laying next to him. Naturally. Yeah, I've never seen this movie before, but I've seen this movie before. The basic structure of this movie has, seriously, been done a LOT. If you're on a spaceship, and you aren't an alien knockoff or a space opera, you're this movie. Anyway, George gives her a quick pop quiz and then figures he really should go ask the crew what the deal is here. This causes wifey to Freak The Hell Out for reasons she can't explain, likely an instinctive knowledge that if he leaves she'll go poof. George though has apparently ALSO seen this movie a fair share of times, takes her over to the nearest escape pod, pops her in, launches it, and goes to compare notes. Again though, everyone else here has already kinda gone crazy from the emotional stress of dead loved ones popping into existence on this space ship orbiting a weird creepy planet and aren't much good conversationally. So he uh... immediately goes back to bed.
|
So yeah. More flashbacks, more naked George Clooney butt, now while eating ramen! More screen saver planet, and... here's another wife copy! Hot off the presses! This time he's less freaked out, she's wondering why she seems to have some significant memory gaps here. Then we've got one of those awkward silences this movie has a lot of, and CopyWife 2 here has a flashback of her own! She's not asleep though, which is good because otherwise we might get some kind of crazy recursion problem here. After she's kinda freaking out and wondering if she's some sort of freaky CopyWife or something. Also, around now I kinda have to wonder why George here hasn't called back to base and explained the situation thus far. Ever notice how few movies about someone going off to do X have them ever remembering to do X once they get there? Anyway, yet MORE flashbacks would seem to suggest the reason original Wifey is dead is that she killed herself after a fight aabout how it was really uncool for her to get an abortion without even telling her husband she was pregnant.
Meanwhile though, in the present, where CopyWife 2 here is starting to piece things together, George goes and talks to Slacker some more and go "Hey, let's uh... not tell CopyWife 2 here about how I kinda freaked out and jettisoned CopyWife 1 into space, OK?" Then everyone, CopyWife 2 included, gets together to have a relatively reasonable chat about the whole thing, where Shut-In kinda accidentally spills those very beans. Yeah, this is kind of an awkward situation. I mean, he didn't outright kill CopyWife 1, odds are they could pick her up and bring her back, but, you know, the basic concept here is Decidedly Upsetting to CopyWife 2, who was already pretty freaked out over the whole CopyWife situation to begin with. So... yeah, Shut-In is kind of a jerk. She defends her actions though by saying, come on, we've all seen this movie 50 times by now, and there's like a 99% chance that these are horrible hellspawn sent to drive them insane and/or trick them into taking them back to earth for some nefarious reason, or at the very least with the side effect of EVERYONE'S dead loved ones popping into existence and all the associated problems.
|
Everyone calls it a night, and already having a wife around, George now ends up spawning a copy of the guy who sent the initial distress call and killed himself out on this here ship... or possibly just has a dream about doing so. Possibly-a-dream CopyCap'm is also in the this is freaky bad stuff camp for what it's worth. Now, what I have to wonder is, OK, we have reasonable reason not to want to go back to earth, but wouldn't it be a good idea not to stay parked around Planet Freakystuff here? Even if you decide it's a totally great thing, observing the copy deaders while not in range of the freakiness would be a good idea, no? Anyway, CopyWife 2, being fairly distraught and, let's face it, prone to this sort of thing, decided to kill herself in the middle of the night, through the interesting means of drinking liquid oxygen. Shortly after making this discovery, her corpse rewinds back to before killing herself. Again, the crew is pretty blase about this. CopyWife 2 sure as heck isn't though. She's really freaked out over being some weird construct based on George's memories, particularly since those memories aren't necessarily perfect, hence being so dang suicidal.
Shut-In points out that she managed to jury-rig a device that bombards the copies with anti-matter that totally obliterates'em, which she personally found quite handy. CopyWife 2 could totally suicide using that, just saying. George is agin'it though. He totally wants to take his freaky copy wife back home with him. Anyway, the next night... because seriously, these people are all narcoleptic or something and can only stay conscious long enough to have a quick chat every day, CopyWife 2 drugs George and goes for that whole Suicide By SCIENCE method. Her main logic being how she found original wife's suicide note rifling through his stuff, and really didn't feel like the same person who wrote that. At around this point, Shut-In is all "OK. Seriously. #@$% all this! These things are monsters, we kill'em, we go home, we get into therapy." Not a bad idea I suppose. Then we have the interesting wrinkle in the plot of noticing a funny looking wall, pulling a panel aside, and finding the corpse of Slacker inside. They decide to confront Slacker about this. "Yeah, apparently I'm one of these freaky copy people I guess. What of it?" Shut-In goes OK, we're so totally killing him, this is creepy as heck. Slacker however points out that the copy vaporizer kinda drains power like a mofo, and the ship's orbit is kinda decaying. "So, what I would do, and this is just a suggestion, is just lock me in here, get in the ship you came on, and leave in that." He's apparently immortal, and a monster, and pretty dang crazy at this point, but hey, seems like a workable notion.
So that's what they do. Afterwards though, George is pretty dang guilt-wracked, so after some vague period of ime, he decides to head back and try and find CopyWife 1 again, or maybe make a CopyWife 3, hoping for a more accurate recollection of her. The fact that there's a ship to go back TO is kinda weird though. Didn't we establish that we had no FTL and it had a rapidly degrading orbit? Anyway, he finds the random kid, who, if I didn't mention it, was Cap'm Suicide there's copy person, grabs his hand, and uh... ascends to heaven apparently. Suddenly he's in flashback land, talking to some variant CopyWife in his old kitchen, we kinda zoom out through the planet, get the title, and.... credits. Large, thin lettered, sans serif credits. And... huh. Based on the book by Stanislaw Lem. OK, so I guess it WASN'T a repurposed adventure game script. Or if it was, it was one based on a book. I have to say though, for being based on a Stanislaw Lem book, that was WEIRDLY grounded and coherent. I mean, yeah, compared to the average movie it was pretty meandering and has a super vague ending that leaves a fair number of plot threads dangling, but, well, read The Futurological Congress some time. Dude is a weird weird writer.
