Классика Станислава Лема: почему «Солярис» Стивена Содерберга остается актуальным предупреждением о технологиях

A film currently streaming has profound things to say about grief, our modern epidemic of loneliness, and the potentially devastating effects of Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is a film made by top Hollywood talent, boasting great direction, cinematography and acting. It also has a message about the dangers of technology and the wisdom of accepting human limits. It is a movie that has grown on me over the years and which I now consider to be a conservative classic. That film is Solaris, a 2002 George Clooney science fiction vehicle that was directed by Steven Soderbergh. Solaris bombed upon its release but played last year as part of the AFI Silver Theater’s series on Stanislaw Lem. Lem (1921-2006) was a brilliant Polish science fiction writer. His 1961 novel Solaris, on which the film is based, is considered his masterpiece. There is a 1972 Soviet version of Solaris directed by Andrei Tarkovsky which won a Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival when it was released. Poland has also named 2001 the year of Stanislaw Lem. Lem, a Polish author who lived under communism, witnessed firsthand what happens when totalitarians take over a society. As science fiction scholar Carl Tighe noted in an essay about Lem: Virtually all of Lem’s novels can be read as parables about what happens to societies and people when channels of communication are blocked, about the difficulty of making a revolutionary society or fundamentally changing human nature by social or political engineering on the slender basis of the knowledge of humanity at our disposal. As such, his novels are profoundly humanistic, a coded criticism of the kind of society that that developed under Stalin.