Summary: Solaris is a remake of Andrei Tarkovsky's Russian film (often called the "Soviet 2001"), itself an adaptation of the Polish Stanislaw Lem's novel, and is anything but a typical American science fiction film. Psychologist Chris Kelvin (George Clooney, playing it very cool and introverted) is sent to a space station orbiting the perhaps-living planet Solaris to investigate a loss of communication with Earth, and finds only two survivors: a free-associating neurotic (Jeremy Davies) and a control freak (Viola Davis), along with several corpses and evidence of recent violence. Kelvin is shocked to wake up next to his wife Rhea (Natascha McElhone), who committed suicide back on Earth years ago, and treats her like a body-snatched alien, disposing of the creature by jettisoning her into space. But she comes back again, and Kelvin realises she isn't a soulless monster out to get him but a genuinely self-aware construct built from his own memories. Though warned against getting involved, Kelvin tries to maintain a relationship with the non-human woman, hoping to avoid this time the mistakes he made that led to Rhea's death.
Steven Soderbergh, the most versatile and unpredictable director in Hollywood, stages a few big space moments, fascinated by the red and stringy ball of Solaris itself, but mostly sticks to interiors that have a Bergman-esque austerity, with Clooney and McElhone inhabiting their own room and going through deep emotional traumas while avoiding actual outbursts. It may be too interior a film for mainstream audiences, though at a clipped hour-and-a-half it isn't as hard going for non-devotees as the three-hour Tarkovsky version, but there is a lot of real meat here none the less. --Kim Newman
Solaris
