‘Solaris’ says it all

Science fiction has been exploring the hard-to-define border between the human and the nonhuman for some time now (“Rooting for the Robot,” by Reed Johnson, May 25). Early works include the remarkable “D’Alembert’s Dream” (1769) by the great thinker of the French Enlightenment, Denis Diderot, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s “Frankenstein” (1818), probably the first masterpiece of science-fiction writing.

Johnson alludes to Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1926), but the first treatments of this theme on celluloid go back much earlier, to Paul Wegener’s first version of “The Golem” (1914) and “Homunculus” (1916), directed by Otto Rippert.

Johnson does not mention “The X-Files,” which has explored this subject in some of its episodes, nor either of the film adaptations of Stanislaw Lem’s “Solaris,” directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972) and Steven Soderbergh (2002), respectively. In these films, just as in Lem’s remarkable novel, the question of deciding whether replicant creatures produced by the planet Solaris should be treated as human beings plays a key role in the development of the story.

Unfortunately, when commercial producers have had the bright idea of kicking this theme around on celluloid, often the result is likely to be totally inane rather than thought-provoking.

It may not be possible to change dreck into gold as medieval alchemists fantasized, but Ridley Scott and his collaborators proved that it’s always possible to work the opposite by transforming Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,” a devastatingly poignant projection of a dystopian future, into the pseudo-Wagnerian glop of “Blade Runner.” Although “The Matrix” cannot be accused of trashing a masterpiece of science-fiction literature, its premise was about as profound as a Philosophy 1A term paper written by an undergraduate on acid.

Both films package intellectually impoverished contents inside a sugar coating of special effects.

Dave Clayton

San Diego