Solaris

No fancy CGi or snappy one lines. Instead a soulful meditation on the choices we make in our lives, and how untaken paths in our lives haunt us. It also has the best set design on any SciFi flick other than 2001, and quite possibly the most beautiful ever in a SciFi movies, Ms. Bondarchuk.

Why doesn't Itunes include other Tarkovsky films? Nostalghia and The Sacrifice are the best. Spectacular visual cinematography. Not always easy to understand, but incredibly beautiful. Much better than Solaris.

I think your opinion of this film will really, really, really depend on who you are, for two big reasons: 1. Every piece of material in the film is in there for a reason. Meaning this is intelligent, focused filmmaking. 2. Every piece of material in the film is given a lot of screentime. Meaning you get long, long, long shots and sequences which establish things that, yes, you could technically establish with three seconds of footage. What you make of these two factors is really dependent on who you are. The bottom line is that Tartovsky takes his time getting to where he is going, and in the hands of any other filmmaker - for better or for worse - this film would have been an hour shorter. I'm a patient person; it was clear to me from the first five minutes that his sense of pacing was very... luxurious, shall we say... and I just sort of accepted that and went with it. And if you can do that, I think there's plenty to appreciate in the film. But because of that pacing, this film just isn't going to please everybody, and I really can't blame anyone for finding it gratuitous. Also, this film clearly shows its age. The plot, the writing style, the character development, is all very reminiscent of 60s and 70s science fiction. It's intelligent, but the characters are generally there to serve the higher concept of the story - they debate philosophy, they draw conclusions about the nature of life, etc. Most modern science fiction film focuses on the plot and allows the philosophy to remain implicit, with the exception of a single, carefully-placed line here or there. I can't necessarily promise you'll like or dislike this film. Personally, I'm sort of on the fence and feel no particular need to hop off and take a side. Parts of it really hit me, and parts of it left me kind of cold. All in all? I don't know, really.

Incredible movie. Now, I bought the standard version and then it became available in HD. Any chance I can upgrade for 5 or 10 bucks, as opposed to buying it outright?

Tarkovsky succeeds in using film to explore personhood excellently and deeply. Kubric is fabulously hampered and shallow in this regard. For instance when Kelvin arrives at Solaris, he trips after getting out of his spacecraft. What a well-rounded acknowledgment of humanity. To be human is fragile, beautiful, terrible, mysterious, sorrowful. On the other hand with '2001 A Space Odyssey' we cannot progress deeper than the veneer of humanity. Women like machines walk perfectly, upside down, with special elegant shoes. The complexity of technology outweighs the complexity of humanity. It is a sterile film and remains so even after David Bowman encounters and is changed by the technology of the monolith. His expanding consciousness, though presented as a supreme good, has expanded at the expense of embodied relationship, warmth, and a more honest vision of the challenges of being human. There is a creative, psychological, even a spiritual acheivement in Tarkovsky's 'Solaris' that Kubric doesn't touch in '2001' .

Being a fan of the Soderbergh / Clooney version, I wanted to see this one and am happy iTunes includes it. As iowabrit mentions, it is tedious to watch a car drive through a tunnel for five minutes. The special effects are skunky (yes the movie is thirty years old, but remember how amazing 2001 space odyssey was? well it came out four years Before this one, hats off to Stanley Kubrick). The philosophical commentary is lame or perhaps it does not survive translation from Russian. On the bright side, the tragic heroine and love relationship is explored with more depth (well, for a few moments at least). I suppose the final chapter is to actually read original book by Lem who, I gather, also disliked this film.

Overly long and pretty boring in places. Like many Russian film directors Tarkovsky seems to think that people staring off into the distance for minutes on end somehow gives a movie 'meaning' whereas (for me at least) it just makes me want to shout 'get on with it!!'

This and "2001" are the two greatest sci-fi movies of all time.