(So I’m putting the date on there because of course Steven Soderbergh did a remake of this movie (or maybe a re-adaptation of the Stanisław Lem book, depending on how you look at it — but no, after seeing this, definitely a movie remake) with George Clooney, but I’m talking about the original Tarkovsky version.)

This is a movie that I’ve known about forever. Back when I was a teen, I read something (I’ve long forgotten where) that mentioned that this was the only SF movie to really do the same thing that 2001 was doing. Which of course made me interested in it, but it’s not like teen me had the option of somehow magically tracking down Russian films from the ’70s, you know? Blockbuster wasn’t going to be carrying this.

But so I’ve always imagined it as this really ponderous, intensely obscurantist kind of movie, because that’s how it was described in these forgotten things I read. And probably if I hadn’t already seen a handful of other Tarkovsky films before this, I would have found it to be so, because it definitely is a Tarkovsky joint — it’s got a stately pace (coming in at a shade under three hours), it’s got the intercuttings between color and monochrome, it’s got the gorgeous cinematography, and it doesn’t exactly take a spartan view of what scenes really need to be part of the movie.

But compared to Andrei Rublev or even Stalker, this is a fairly straightforward and accessible movie. Yeah, it’s still long and slow-paced (which, not gonna lie: my shitty sleep lately has me falling asleep on a dime, and I had to watch this over multiple days, pausing it when I couldn’t stay awake, but that’s on me, not the movie), but it more or less just comes out and says what it’s about and gives you a straightforward character-based drama right up there onscreen.

It definitely deserves its reputation as an SF classic; it’s exploring interesting ideas and is stylistically rich. Also, because it’s so character-driven and has an almost fantasy-like tone to it, it doesn’t feel dated in the slightest; if I told you that this was filmed last year, you might comment on the deliberately retro haircuts, but that’d be about the only thing you’d call out.

Which of course raises the question of why Soderbergh remade it, and I think I actually understand this one: The key is that Soderbergh’s version came in at a mere 99 minutes. You’ll recall that Soderbergh had at one point an edit of 2001 (since taken down for obvious copyright reasons) that got it down to 110 minutes. I think Soderbergh is just a guy who wants to tell a story economically and with as little “wasted” screen time as possible. His version has basically the same story, but it tightens everything up a lot, paces its reveals out to be more conventionally dramatic, and kinda doubles up on some themes and motivations.

It’s a very reasonable impulse, and Soderbergh’s take definitely feels more like a mainstream movie (though not mainstream enough to prevent its audience from being confused and angry), but I think there’s something to be said for movies that not only give scenes time to breathe, but give them time to lie down and take a bit of a rest. Both movies are worth watching, but I’m going to give my nod to the Tarkovsky version.