To understand the film Solaris, I first watched the earlier version that was produced in Russian by the director Andrei Tarkovsky. One of the major parallels to BBM that I noticed was the point, made primarily visually, that Nature is beautiful, omnipotent, and mysterious. The beginning of the movie takes place in rural Russia at the dacha of the main character Kris. There are many shots of the pond in front of the dacha. These are echoed later in the film as he travels to the planet Solaris to figure out what to do about a space station that has mysterious problems. There are shots of an enigmatic ocean outside the space station that seems to have a consciousness of its own.
