solaris raze been meaning to track this film (or these films) down for a while now. there's the andrei tarkovsky original from 1972, and the steven soderbergh remake from 2002. opinions on which film is superior, and why, flap all over the place. i'd probably opt for the original by default, and go from there. without having seen either version, i think the premise alone is fascinating. there exists a planet that reads the minds of its visitors and provides them with perfect replicas of people they have loved and lost. the catch is, the planet knows exactly as much about the people being recreated as the visitors do, and no more. a man finds himself reunited with his wife, who took her own life. only, it isn't really her; it's the sum total of everything he knew about his dead wife, funneled into a perfectly human alien life form. she's suicidal not because of anything internal that drives her to self-destruct, but simply because her husband remembers her being that way. she takes the raw material she's given, and then starts over from that point with her own consciousness and free will — effectively a new life form drawing on a reservoir of transferred personality traits and memories. this is as much as i've allowed myself to learn about the story. i'd rather let the rest unfold without knowing where things are headed. when you think about it, on some level, every relationship we have in our lives is something like this. you can never know another person. not completely. all we really know is what we believe to be true, and what we think we know about someone. we decide who they are based on our thoughts and impressions, but we can never know exactly what they think or feel. we can only imagine what *we* might think or feel if we were them. not the same thing. so who_are_you? and who_am_i? and if we don't know ourselves, how close can anyone else ever get to unraveling that mystery? for all we know, every single person we've ever known has a different idea of who we are. throw all those ideas in a blender, and the pulpy mess that comes out still won't provide any easy answers. there are some questions that just don't have easy answers. and those are often the most interesting ones to chew on for a late night snack. 130321 ... Pilgrim We All create Our World Inside Our Minds. Nothing More. Nothing Less. 130321 what's it to you? who go blather from