[Editor's Note: The Conversations is a monthly feature in which Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard discuss a wide range of cinematic subjects: critical analyses of films, filmmaker overviews, and more. This is the second half of a two-part conversation; the first part can be found here. Readers should expect to encounter spoilers.]

ED HOWARD: You selected Steven Soderbergh's Solaris as the film from the last few years you believe to be unfairly overlooked, and it's not hard to see why you chose it. There are few types of films that are more often overlooked and forgotten, en masse, than the amorphous category of the "remake." Fairly or unfairly, critics tend to be inherently skeptical of remake projects, even if audiences flock to genre remakes like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or the "reboots" of franchises like Friday the 13th and Halloween. In Soderbergh's case, his film couldn't even be called a commercial success; it was more or less a flop whose memory has almost completely faded from the popular imagination in just a few short years. When Soderbergh's film came out in 2002, I skipped over it for the same reason that I suspect a lot of other people did: by all appearances, it was yet another Hollywood "updating" of a classic film from years before, a film that if you ask me didn't really need to be revisited. Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 Solaris is a classic of the science fiction genre, as well-loved and admired among art-cinema fans as Stanley Kubrick's more popularly known 2001: A Space Odyssey, to which Tarkovsky was directly responding in making his own film. Moreover, the 1961 novel of the same name by Stanislaw Lem is also a classic, one of the greatest works of sci-fi literature (and a personal favorite of mine). Soderbergh was stepping into tremendous shoes by attempting to tell this story, and I'm sure he realized that this film would inevitably be compared to its predecessors, making it difficult to evaluate on its own terms.

The question then becomes: on its own terms, what is Soderbergh's Solaris? What was his rationale for revisiting a classic story? What does he bring to the film to make it his own? Does this new Solaris deserve its current obscurity or should it be remembered simultaneously with its predecessors (or even elevated above them)? I have my own opinions on these questions, but for now I'm interested to know what you think. Does what I've described gibe with your own reasons for picking this film? And why do you think Soderbergh's Solaris deserves a second look? Continue Reading »