Science fiction can predict or inspire mankind’s future. But the great Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky had no such aspirations for his adaptation of the equally great Polish novelist Stanisław Lem’s 1961 masterpiece Solaris; he just needed work. His previous movie, Andrei Rublev, played briefly in 1966 before censors shelved it until 1971, and his script for what ultimately became 1975’s The Mirror failed to gain traction in-between. A story as cerebral as Solaris hardly screams potboiler, but 10 million tickets sold can’t be wrong.
