Review of “The Thing from Inner Space” (1999)

Premises of fiction that threaten to materialize the true desires of the characters. Quickly passing the archetypical such “Id-Machine” in Forbidden Planet (1956), this essay focuses on the novel Solaris (1961), Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film adaptation of the same, and Tarkovsky’s later films, particularly Stalker (1979), then moving on to the non-sfnal Nostalgia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986).

One can see, now, why Lem’s novel had to exert such an attraction on Tarkovsky: the planet Solaris seems to provide the ultimate embodiment of the Tarkovskian notion of a heavy humid stuff (earth) which, far from functioning as the opposite of spirituality, serves as its very medium; this gigantic “material Thing which thinks” literally gives body to the direct coincidence of Matter and Spirit.