Film nerds, if you are reading this, shut up. I know the original Solaris, made by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972, was a great film. I know remaking exceptional films just to put the dialogue in English is stupid. But even if your hatred of remakes verges on the fanatical, see this movie.
Steven Soderbergh’s remake is extraordinary. Based on a novel by Stanislaw Lem, Solaris tells the story of Chris Kelvin (George Clooney), a psychologist sent to sort out a mystery on a space station orbiting Solaris, a distant planet. A cryptic message from Gibarian (Ulrich Tukur), a scientist on the station, says something has gone horribly wrong. After the loss of a military mission sent to investigate, the corporation that runs the station sends Kelvin.
But Kelvin has secrets of his own. A widower, he is haunted by thoughts of his dead wife Rheya (Natascha McElhone). After arriving at the station, he finds the remaining members of the crew are being haunted by apparitions of the dead—walking, talking copies of people they loved.
When Kelvin is visited by a facsimile of his wife, he begins to understand the mystery and its connection to the planet Solaris. And as his wife’s reincarnation remembers the end of her life, Kelvin is wracked by guilt for his part in his wife’s death.
Beautifully shot, and accompanied by a restrained yet haunting score, the strongest part of Solaris is the acting. Clooney plays Kelvin without the smirk and swagger that mar so many of his performances. His performance here is restrained and thoughtful as he brings the audience into Kelvin’s life with Rheya and his new life with Rheya’s doppelganger aboard the station. Natascha McElhone is a standout as Kelvin’s wife. Her face is both beautiful and vulnerable as the audience watches her and Clooney fall in love and break each other’s hearts.
Solaris isn’t a Star Trek-like space procedural about dilithium crystals and warp drives, with phasers set to kill. Instead, it is a meditation on the ultimate impossibility of knowing another person, with an elegiac quality that will haunt you long after you leave the theatre.
