Fly me to Solaris

"How can you be so sure if you don't know whether it is real or not?" If you cannot prove it but you choose not to believe, why cannot I choose to believe?

Like Carl Popper said, scientists have been trying hard to distinguish themselves from metaphysicians, however, science in itself involves a huge amount of metaphysics. Because it is based on a lot of very fundamental assumptions that you can never prove.

This world, I would like to say, is contaminated by materialism. There was once a time we people could tolerate and probably accept the existence of all different kinds of believes and we all tried so hard to understand this world. But now, like what scientists would not like to admit, we adore science too much as the flies' passion on rotten foods. We suddenly stopped thinking. We are satisfied with what we have and we are crazy playing with it. We are not only enjoying it, we want more. Still not knowing what we are and why we are here, we keep a thirst for the things that we don't even know if we are supposed to possess.

All creatures, with or without a brain, do stupid things when they are satisfied. Once upon time we were so happy declaring that we were unique. However, after years, we turned no more than the dirty monkeys in Gulliver's trip. So we came to Solaris, with great ambition and unexplainable confidence. We came here for the entire human race on the Earth, although we still don't have a single clue of what we are on that planet for.

A lot of humanists sensed this huge question mark. Kubrick's 2001 also demonstrated a possibility of getting closer to the keys of big questions by not depending on science too much. If there are most arrogant scientists, the craziest words they could possibly say might be, ok gentlemen, we are familiar enough with our planet. Only the most stupid of the most arrogant believe that we can explain things even out of this planet, such as in Solaris, using what we learnt on Earth.

I know that my interpretation involves some subjective thoughts and feelings. However, I can be sure that Soderbergh doesn't deny the possibility of multiple explanations of the world or the universe and he believes that we have the right to choose among them.

"哈囉, Neo. Look, here is a Matrix inside which people live regularly with rules created by God and guaranteed by computers. Also, you have the power of destroying it. What do you think? To be, or not to be?"

Solaris is such an elegant movie with profound retrospection, beautiful photography and reasonably good acting. It is set on a stage that seems so strange but so familiar. It could be Solaris. It could also be inside our mind. Soderbergh reminded us again, that if there is anything that makes us human race so special, it is the spirit we possess. It is that we do something that the creatures who only have a brain cannot understand.