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SOLARIS Send This Review to a Friend
If I were a doctor with a patient who was an insomniac, I'd send the person straight to see "Solaris." If that wouldn't put the poor soul to sleep, what would?
Steven Soderbergh sure stayed awake. He wrote, directed, photographed and edited this adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's science-fiction tale already made into a 1972 screen version by Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky.
George Clooney is usually an interesting actor to watch and he's the one strong point here. In this futuristic story he plays psychiatrist Chris Kelvin, who travels to check on a space station where strange things are happening as it orbits the planet Solaris. The mission is to find out what's happening, as there are mysterious, threatening powers at work. Kelvin has been tapped to investigate.
To his amazement he encounters his late wife Rheya (Natascha McElhone). What's going on? Is it his imagination? Is there a strange power of replication? For Kelvin it's a second chance at love in the wake of his wife's earlier suicide and the guilt he has carried. For the scientists aboard it's a sign that Solaris can pose a danger to earth. Viola Davis plays the upset, frightened Gordon, who insists that destroying Rheya is essential. But Kelvin fights to keep her "alive." The story has its final twist, a cross between renewed love and sci-fi hokum.
Stylistically, Soderbergh works up a dreamlike (very dreamlike) atmosphere aboard the space station, and the story floats along wrapped in the requisite visual accompaniment that goes with an enigmatic voyage into the future. The cast also includes Jeremy Davis, Ulrich Tukur among others. The actors are fine; it's the story and the dreary mood that become relentlessly boring. A Twentieth Century Fox release.
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