"We don't know what to do with other worlds" - The BBC's Solaris

For the past few nights, I've been listening to the Solaris audio drama produced by BBC Radio. It comes as two 1-hour episodes and I'm nearly finished with it.

The production is great with the cast providing some wonderful voice acting. None of the cast members are familiar to me and perhaps this has helped since I hear their voices and have no preconceived notions about them, unlike seeing George Clooney as the story's protagonist Kris Kelvin in Steven Soderbergh's 2002 film version and thinking about ER's Dr. Doug Ross. Tim McMullan plays a suitably skittish Snow while Stuart Richman's Sartorius is perfectly overbearing. Aurally, the story is enhanced with understated music that nudges the listener rather than pushes them towards feeling one way or another. Some of the music reminds me of that from Blade Runner, especially the unicorn dream sequence. It is amazing what can be done with just a few piano notes. The way boots clank on metal gangplanks contrasts well with the near silent ambience of the ship to give an atmosphere of emptiness, of loneliness. Listeners are able to get a good sense of just how isolated the characters are.

As far as the story goes, the radio adaptation tacks a course between Stanislaw Lem's source novel and Soderbergh's movie based on it. (I leave out Tarkovsky's film here although I think it is a great movie because the book and the Soderbergh's film are at opposite ends of the spectrum, so to speak.) This was also the chosen method of the BBC when it adapted The Name of the Rose. That production leaned heavily toward the medieval Sherlock Holmes approach taken by Jean-Jacques Annaud for his 1986 film but also included some conversations about religion and the 13th century which were abandoned during the conversion for the big screen.

Similarly, the Beeb's Solaris places the emphasis on the relationship between Kelvin and the phantom incarnation of his dead wife, Rheya. This moves it towards Soderbergh's side which stands clearly in favor of Solaris as a love story. However, the radio drama incorporates generous doses of the science/sci-fi elements that form the thematic crux of Lem's novel, namely, the impossibility of understanding other life forms being a limit of science as a human endeavor. While it leaves the book's lengthy passages describing mankind's futile attempts at comprehending the Ocean out, it retains Snow's "we need mirrors" lecture to Kelvin. The Berton report is present, albeit in a severely truncated form. Kelvin is allowed to express his skepticism about Sartorius' experiment to communicate with the Ocean and there are long, pensive scenes where he just stares out at the Ocean.

The BBC have made a wonderful, atmospheric radio drama that manages to balance the inner world of a love story with the outer world. Highly recommended.