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SOLARIS, director Andrei Tarkovsky’s science fiction cult classic, presents an uncompromisingly unique and poetic meditation on space travel and its physical and existential ramifications. When a long-standing Russian space station hovering above the planet Solaris begins to report strange phenomena, Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis), an eager and intrepid cosmonaut, departs for the station in order to investigate. Warned by former Solaris specialists that the planet presents incomprehensible obstacles, Kelvin is nevertheless secure in his mission. However, the minute he steps foot onto the haunted and desolate space station, everything changes. Kelvin learns that of the three members left on board, one has killed himself and the remaining two have seemingly become schizophrenic recluses. When Kelvin’s dead ex-wife appears out of the shadows, the reports that Solaris is a thinking being capable of reading human minds and materializing their desires and memories are proven true. As Kelvin joins the rest of the crew in a seemingly life-or-death struggle to understand this phenomena, Tarkovsky crafts a mind-altering earthbound space odyssey. Filled with visions of humanity versus itself, SOLARIS takes the philosophical investigations of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY to extravagant lengths and offers no answers except this: The only frontier humanity has yet to conquer is that of its own existence.
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