hris Kelvin (Clooney) sleepwalks through his days as a psychiatrist, still grieving for his dead wife, Rheya (McElhone). That's when he gets tapped to investigate a mystery. Kelvin's friend, a scientist named Gibarian (German actor Ulrich Tukur), has sent a cryptic video communiqué from the space station Prometheus, orbiting the mysterious planet Solaris.
Earth has lost contact with the station, and a security force dispatched to look into it has also disappeared. Can Kelvin travel to the station? "I think you need to," Gibarian says. "You will see what I mean."
The blue planet of Solaris pulsates with light and energy. Upon arrival at Prometheus, Kelvin finds the station virtually abandoned. Blood streaks the floor and the walls. He proceeds cautiously into the lab, then the morgue, where he finds two body bags. One contains the corpse of Gibarian.
Hearing a noise, Kelvin goes to the control room, where a spacey young man, Snow (Davies), tells him very little about what has happened. Only that people have disappeared and Gibarian killed himself. And that the only other surviving crew member, Gordon (Davis), has locked herself in her quarters.
Seeking answers, Kelvin asks Gordon what's going on. "Until it starts happening to you, there's really no point in discussing it," she tells Kelvin curtly. Then she asks: "How long do you think you can go without sleep?" Later Kelvin spies a small boy running around the station, Gibarian's son. How did he get there?
Unnerved, Kelvin settles into his quarters, listening to tapes of Gibarian. As he sleeps, he dreams of Rheya—how they met, how they fell in love. The blue planet Solaris pulsates with light and energy.
As Kelvin lies in bed, a gentle hand strokes his neck. He awakes with a start to find Rheya lying in bed next to him. "How are you here?" he gasps. "I'm so happy to see you," she says. "I love you so much."
An emotional voyage into the human heart
Solaris—produced by Titanic director James Cameron and helmed by Traffic director Soderbergh—is an ambitious remake of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 Russian SF epic of the same name, based on Polish SF author Stanislaw Lem's novel. But the film makes use of its source material primarily for its premise, setting and situations and stands on its own as a unique vision of Soderbergh, who not only wrote and directed, but also photographed and edited, the movie.
Soderbergh has said that he's not interested in the hardware of science fiction, preferring what he calls "software" SF. Solaris reflects this. Though it pays homage to Tarkovsky's images, as well as those of Stanley Kubrick's classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, Soderbergh has chosen to eschew virtually all of the trappings of SF in favor of a film that focuses on character, relationships and the complex interplay of image and idea.
But Solaris fits squarely in the finer traditions of literary SF, making use of an otherworldly premise to examine deep dilemmas of the human condition: What would we do if we had the chance to redress past mistakes? How much would we sacrifice for a second chance? Are we puppets of a greater intelligence, or beings with the will to write our own stories? As Gibarian tells Kelvin at one point, "There are no answers. Only choices."
To this difficult material, Soderbergh brings considerable gifts as a filmmaker, particularly in the way he breaks up the narrative through editing and flashbacks and in the use of color, sound and the gamelan-flavored score. The look of the film is burnished and precise, each element underscoring the film's themes. Against the background of this carefully composed aesthetic, Soderbergh has managed to elicit nuanced and naturalistic performances from his small cast, particularly from Clooney and McElhone, infusing real emotion into the fantastic situation. And unlike Tarkovsky's sprawling 167-minute opus, Soderbergh's Solaris is focused enough to clock in at just over 90 minutes.
