HackerTubewatch
Surprise me
Frame from Solaris | SCIENCE FICTION | FULL MOVIE | directed by Tarkovsky Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Solaris | SCIENCE FICTION | FULL MOVIE | directed by Tarkovsky

Mosfilm
Other
YouTube
2 HN users recommended this video2 months2022–2025 score 3
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN recommends it as a masterpiece of emotional, contemplative science fiction, and draws analogies between its alien ocean and AI.

Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film Solaris, in which a psychologist is sent to a space station orbiting a planet with an alien intelligence and meets his dead wife there. It is the full movie, uploaded by Mosfilm.

“the film's a masterpiece that I highly recommend” (HN, 2025)

2 strong recommendations · 3 citations · Other

5 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@haunter Apr 2023 Strongly recommends
on HN thread 2001: A Space Odyssey
Anyone else prefers Solaris over 2001? Both are great movies for sure but somehow Tarkovsky made everything more emotional and relatable. I love 2001 but to me Solaris is on another level (and Stalker too) If you have never watched it's on Youtube [this video] (Mosfilm is generally one of the GOAT Youtube channels with their uploads) There is an older upload on their other channel if you want different subs [link] [link] (2 parts because of the original 2 reels)
Tarkovsky's Solaris, emotional and relatable sci-fi
@thrance Apr 2025 Strongly recommends
on HN thread Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)
2 years prior, in 1972, Andrei Tarkovsky adapted Stanisław Lem's Solaris to the big screen in the Soviet Union, which may have contributed to Dick's paranoia. Anyway, the film's a masterpiece that I highly recommend, and since it was published before 1975 it is not subject to copyright. You can find it on YouTube [1]. [1] [this video]
Tarkovsky's Solaris, public domain on YouTube

Citations, criticism and jokes

@haunter Jul 2022 Cites it
on HN thread 8-Part Film Adaptation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina Is Free Online
Read more
That's because they have 2 accounts a russian and a global english one. Russian [link] Global [link] Usually both channels have subtitles but generally the global one is burnt-in while the russian one is selectable from the Youtube interface. Also the russian channel has much much more uploads. And movies differ too to some extent. For example, Solaris is a single title in the global english channel (restored vesion) [this video] Whereas it's 2 part title as it was originally back then (2 reels) [link] [link] Last but not least check geoblocking [link] For example Solaris is geoblocked in the US, both versions [this video] [link]
@triska May 2023 Cites it
on HN thread Watch Tarkovsky's Best Films Online for Free
Solaris in particular seems more relevant than ever with the rise of ChatGPT and other generative AI services that do not understand what their creations mean to us, and often create eery simulacra of life. The final scene of Solaris may as well have been created by Midjourney: [this video] Quoting from the book: "QUESTION: Do you mean, for example, that the hands didn’t move as human hands would move, because the joints were not sufficiently supple? BERTON: No, not at all. But . . . these movements had no meaning. Each of our movements means something, more or less, serves some purpose . . . "
Final scene compared to generated imagery
@MichaelMoser123 Jul 2023 Cites it
on HN thread Douglas Hofstadter changes his mind on Deep Learning and AI risk
Read more
> The question is, when will we feel that those things actually deserve to be thought of as being full-fledged, or at least partly fledged, "I"s? this LLM thing is more like a collective "we", it is making a prediction in the sense of the relevant training data, it probably wouldn't say anything that contradicts the consensus. Maybe the LLM's are just a mirror of our society. And our society doesn't seem to assign a lot of value to individualism, as such. i think that might be similar to the movie Solaris by Tarkovsky. The movie is starring an alien ocean, which is some sort of mirror, that is showing us who we are (maybe it has a different meaning, not quite sure about it). You can watch it on youtube: [this video] (i think you also get this theme with Stalker - this zone is also telling us who we are)
Alien ocean as mirror, analogy for LLMs

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

Keyboard shortcuts

/
Search
j k
Next / previous video
r
Surprise me
l
Like (video page)
w
Watch later (video page)
?
This help
Esc
Close