Solaris

Plot synopsis:
We first see psychologist Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) going through his daily routine, getting up in the morning, taking the train to work, and talking to his patients in their group therapy sessions. However, there is an underlying sadness about Chris, which we'll learn more about later.One evening, Chris cuts his finger by accident in the kitchen while making dinner and washes the finger under the faucet and looks at the cut. (Important later on). He is then visited by two men who give him a video message from his friend, Dr. Gibarian (Ulrich Tukur), who has relayed this message from Prometheus, a space station in orbit around the planet Solaris. Solaris is an ocean planet that is being researched for its commercial or resource potential. Dr. Gibarian implores Chris to come to the space station, not explaining why exactly, but that something incredible has happened and that he has to come and see for himself. The two men explain to Chris that contact has been lost with the space station; an intervention team was sent and not heard from again. The government may abandon the station and the crew unless Chris travels up there to find out what happened.Chris makes the trip to the space station and upon arrival finds it mostly empty. However, stains of blood are everywhere on the walls. He stumbles upon a makeshift morgue and is devastated to find Dr. Gibarian as one of two dead people on the slab. As Chris leaves the room, he fails to notice blood accumulating in the ceiling panels.He proceeds to find only two survivors of the crew in the space station. The first is a young man named Snow (Jeremy Davies) who is EXTREMELY WEIRD, and only provides very vague and confusing answers. Chris learns that Dr. Gibarian committed suicide. Chris asks about doctor Coutard who was also supposed to be on board. Snow says the doctor was killed by an intervention team when he tried to escape from them. One other doctor has simply vanished; the only thing they know is that he is no longer aboard the station. Chris then proceeds to the other survivor, a woman named Dr. Gordon (Viola Davis). She has locked herself in her room because she is traumatized by what has happened to her and the others. Chris can hear another person stumbling inside her room, but she refuses to let him in. Both Snow and Gordon make it clear that discussing their issues is of no use unless the same things start happening to Kelvin.A little boy suddenly runs around the corridor. Chris tries to catch up to boy but loses him. Dr. Snow tells him it is Dr. Gibarian's son. When asked how the boy could be on board, Snow remains vague, but implies that this is part of the problems everyone is experiencing.Chris successfully coaxes Dr. Gordon out of her room and discusses her frail mental state, although she remains elusive about what caused it. Chris goes to bed and dreams about his wife, Rheya (Natascha McElhone), the time they first met, their courtship and making love to her. When Chris wakes up in the morning, Rheya is right beside him in bed. Chris jumps out of bed all freaked out. He asks how she got here, but Rheya doesn't seem to know what he means by that and continues to act as if they were still married. Chris realizes that Rheya cannot be real because Rheya has been dead for years. Chris tricks her into going into an escape pod and seals it shut. He sends her out to space and then breaks down crying.Chris receives Snow, who explains that Solaris is responsible for all of this. The planet is somehow able to read the minds of the scientists during sleep, and conjures up a living facsimile of their most beloved. Snow himself got a visit from his brother. The boy they saw earlier was actually a replica of Gibarian's son who appeared out of nowhere. Snow tells Chris that Rheya will appear again if he wants her to.The next night, Chris dreams about Rheya and in the morning, she's there in bed with him again. She is another copy and totally unaware of the first one. Chris asks her what she remembers and all she knows is her life with him. She has no clue how she arrived at the space station. Chris decides to let her stay with him, and tells Snow that the second Rheya may never know about what he did to the first.In time, Rheya has thoughts of her own and begins to have doubts about who she really is. She has all the memories of her life with Chris, but they do not feel like they belong to her. To her distress, she starts to remember that she suffered from a bad childhood and depressions. When she got pregnant once, she had an abortion without telling Chris, who left her furiously. She then committed suicide.All aboard have a meeting. They speculate how the planet creates these visitors from matter, and theorize how they could permanently dissolve them with a certain type of radiation. Against Gordon's judgement, Chris theorizes that Solaris is giving him a second chance with his wife, and he wants to take her home to Earth. Gordon thinks otherwise; more visitors could follow, some could go to Earth, and the effects may be devastating. She thinks that Rheya should be vaporized immediately, but Chris refuses and intends to carry on his relationship with Rheya. Gordon spills out to Rheya about the first copy of Rheya that Chris had sent out to space. Rheya is apalled and leaves. Chris is angered, but Gordon stresses that the visitors are not human, and that it is too dangerous to treat them as such.That night, Chris has a dream in which he talks to Gibarian about the visitors. Gibarian implies that he communicates for Solaris. Chris wants to know what Solaris wants from them. Gibarian says that they cannot be sure, and the planet may not even have plans for them; there are no answers, only choices. Chris awakens, and finds Rheya missing. He searches for her and finds her lying on the floor: she has killed herself by drinking liquid oxygen, her face burned where it was in contact with the oxygen.Chris brings her back to his bed where he, Gordon and Snow witness her facial wound suddenly healing itself. Gordon states that she hates watching "their resurrection". Rheya is distraught that she is alive again; she feels that she is not Rheya and therefore should not exist. There is a sudden power drain: Gordon has finished the special weapon and 'tested' it successfully on her visitor. Gordon warns Chris that Rheya will most likely try to kill herself again. Chris becomes determined to protect Rheya. He locks the door and starts taking pills to stay awake, in order to keep an eye on her.Rheya tells Chris that he 'remembered her wrong'; she is depressed and suicidal because that is how Chris remembers her. However, Chris vows to Rheya that they can be happy together and start anew, despite her doubts. In spite of his efforts, Chris falls asleep, dreaming about the breakup with Rheya that led to her suicide from sleeping pills; Chris found her and blamed himself for her death. She left Chris' favorite poem as a suicide note. When Chris wakes up, he finds the door ripped open; Rheya has broken out and has asked Gordon to vaporize her, but not before leaving a goodbye video message for Chris: she states that she can never be the real Rheya, and that it is better this way; she found the suicide note from the real Rheya that Chris had brought with him from Earth, and left it for him to find, again.Chris confronts Gordon in the makeshift morgue and gets angry at her for letting Rheya die; Gordon simply maintains that she only fulfilled Rheya's wish. Suddenly, they look up to the ceiling and see a large patch of blood. Chris opens up the ceiling tile and finds the body of doctor Snow, the cold having preserved the body. They both confront Snow and he admits to killing the doctor because it turns out that.... Snow himself is a visitor! He was the doctor's visitor and the doctor attempted to kill him within 30 seconds of his appearance, but the fake Snow didn't understand why or what was going on, killed the doctor in self-defense and stuffed his body in the ceiling.Gordon advises to vaporize Snow immediately, however Snow warns them that since vaporizing the other visitors, Solaris has increased it mass and the vaporizing equipment has used up most of the station's energy. The entire space station begins to descend towards the planet Solaris. Snow tells Chris and Gordon to evacuate by an escape pod while he stays behind to meet his doom. Chris and Gordon suit up and head towards the escape pod, making preparations to leave.We suddenly see Chris back on Earth, trying to resume his Earth life. He has no idea how long he has been back. While in his kitchen making dinner, he cuts his finger, like before, and rinses it out under the faucet. As he looks at the cut, it begins to heal itself and disappears. Chris suddenly remembers being back on the Prometheus, having second thoughts about escaping, and staying behind. Gordon goes off in the pod by herself as Chris turns back. As the Prometheus starts rocking, Chris is unable to stand on his feet and collapses to the floor. The little boy shows up, walks over and holds Chris' hand as Solaris comes closer.Back in his kitchen, Chris looks up and sees Rheya standing before him. Chris asks her if he is alive or dead; she replies that those words no longer have any meaning, and that their regrets no longer matter, or words to that effect. They embrace as the camera zooms out on Solaris.Now the question is: Is Chris dead and in heaven with Rheya? Or is he in Solaris with another copy of his wife? Or is she the real Rheya? Is Chris himself still real?

Tags: boring, psychological, flashback, psychedelic, philosophical, romantic

Review:
Clarke and Stanley Kubrick decided to make the 'proverbial good sci-fi movie' when they jointly created the film and novel 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Solaris is, however, one of them.Whilst the Russian original is an epic and demanding film, Soderbergh's work should not be considered a remake.
Their design is complemented by some of the best CG spaceship effects I have seen (incredible that it has taken this long for computer graphics to look as good as the model-based technology of 2001, Star Wars and Aliens in the 1960s and 70s).Solaris, the planet itself, is a clever piece of art, seemingly evidencing a degree of emotion by its colouring and detail, as no doubt was the intention.
The camera work is non-intrusive, solid stuff without gimmick (apart from a touch of shaky-cam in the restaurant scene where Kelvin meets Rheya) or overstatement.Add to this a beautiful, timeless score by Cliff Martinez and you have one of the better psychological sci-fi movies ever made.The majority of people will hate Solaris.
If you've seen Tarkovsky's brilliant "Solyaris" this film will seem more like an Americanized tribute than a Hollywoodization of a great piece of Soviet cinema.
This is a great film, and shows that it is possible for Americans to remake classic non-American films sensitively, intelligently and well.To cut to the chase - if you like sci-fi with a soul,which stretches the boundaries of imagination, explores the uncharted realms of the human condition as much as the unknown realities of the universe, and swims upstream against the currents of ethics, physics, and even metaphysics, you will probably enjoy this moody, slow, multi-leveled and heavily textured film.
I am hardly surprised by the very low (in my opinion) ratings received by this film here on IMDb. Solaris is a love story, a story of exploring the fringes of sanity, and of questioning the very nature of reality, and much more.
Those who have read the book will recognize the plot up to close to the end, where the movie veers off in its own attempt for a resolution that Lem did not seem to think necessary to provide in the novel.I was disappointed that the movie had almost nothing to say or show about the sentient ocean of Solaris and humanity's failure to comprehend it.
But I was truly mesmerized by this film's approach to what, I think, is the study of human insanity slipping beyond saving.The film is slow in pace and lengthy, with stretches of tedious silence, letting the imagination of the viewers try understand what happened to each of the characters seen, or heard.
While Soderbergh's Solaris may well be a work of art in its own right, I certainly pity those who haven't read the book or at least seen Tarkovsky's 1972 original adaptation, which is a lot more faithful to Lem's novel in its scope, if not in its vision.
SOLARIS, directed by Steven Soderbergh, and starring George Clooney, is one of those pointless remakes Hollywood has been making these past decades that adds almost nothing to the original classic.
In the film, the Solaris planet takes a person's main dream while they're sleeping (there's even silly close-up shots of Clooney's cranium).
So when Rheya comes back, looking exactly like Kelvin's wife, for me this points out to an obvious weakness in the whole concept of the Solaris planet going into a person's mind and grabbing their version of reality.
Oddly enough, the way Soderbergh approached the idea of a planet reincarnating a long lost loved one into flesh reminded me of the SPACE 1999 episode, A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH, more than the Tarkovsky movie.
As a science fiction film, Solaris follows the same rule as the best of the genre, namely that it isn't the creatures or technology that makes the viewers want to watch, it is the human drama.
When the Solaris alien appears in his cabin, it tells him everything he wants to hear, and appears exactly as he desires.The big question posed by the film is whether we are the sum of how we, and more importantly other people, remember us, or whether there's more that defines our reality.
I have not read the novel on which the film is based and I have watched Tarkovsky's version twice (because it demands it), but by judging this 'Solaris' on its own merits, I think this version is simply a load of old plop.
I did not walk into the movie theater with very high hopes for this film as Andrei Tarkovsky's version of Stanislaw Lem's 1961 novel "Solyaris" is one of my all-time favorite films.
In sum, Soderberg's version of "Solaris" is relentlessly SHALLOW.Clooney is not appropriately cast, and his lack of acting chops robs the audience of identification as there is no character development that a fine actor like Kevin Spacey could give this role.
It might have made sense if we watched the character deteriorate, but as it was played, the character is poorly realized.As for the other actors, Natasha McElhone is better than she was in FearDot.Com, and this is NOT like saying Pauley Shore was better in SON-IN-LAW than he was in BIO-DOME; she's not only beautiful, but gives a decent performance; however, what she lacks is star power, the charisma that a star like Julia Roberts can bring to a picture, thus making Kelvin's yearning and his ultimate decision more real.
It's becoming excruciating watching Davies in any movie; each movie, he is actually getting worse.On an upbeat note, Viola Davis was good.I voted this film a "2" (as the production design is excellent, as is the soundtrack), but is really is a BOMB.Beware a Michaelangelo-inspired visual motif towards the end when Soderbergh really begins channeling the spirit of Stanley Kubrick.Stephen, I knew Kubrick and you're not Kubrick, nor will you ever be.The Web site for "Solaris" presents the film as being from two Academy Award winners, James Cameron and Soderbergh.
The planet Solaris becomes an artistic representation of the true Unknown, and the unknown is that state in which we all exist in, but in which we create forms of meaning to encapsulate the mystery of this moment within the illusion of the Known.Solaris presents through its actions and its very existence a format for the characters, and the viewers, to examine what it means to live safely within the illusion of the Known, but where the reality is actually an existence in which the Known is not a possibility.Do not approach this film with the intention of understanding some final conclusion, for like life itself, it is the writers intention that we question our assumptions about this movie, and possibly about our own lives as well..
It makes no sense whatsoever and if it moved any slower....I will give the film its due in that it is trying to be an arty scifi movie with more flair than pure scifi.But still, something thats that hard to follow just cant be appealing.If you're a classic Scifi lover of action, aliens and at least some kind of story - then I would give this one a skip..
Mr. Soderbergh could have made a classic sci-fi film here, if only he'd made an honest attempt.The funny thing is, if I hadn't read the book I would have liked the film, because it is well directed and has a nice atmospheric mood.
call it something other than Solaris, give the characters different names, don't do anything to remind me of the original story and I'd say it is a good movie.
As a love story and psychological thriller, Solaris works quite well and Soderbergh solidifies his status as one of the great directors working in film..
We've had horror ("Out of Sight"), drama ("Erin Brockovich"), gritty realism ("Traffic"), comedy ("Ocean's Eleven"), and now romance in "Solaris," a film that blew me out of the water - in terms of I was so surprised it sucked.I think this may be the very first film that Steven Soderbergh made that is bad - followed by that stinky "Collinwood" movie.
Not only would it have been much more...hmm...how should I put it...INTERESTING, it would also be about ten times more meaningful than this sorry mess.The film (based upon a novel and previous film titled "Solaryis") takes place sometime in the future, when a pshrink named Chris Klein (George Clooney) is sent to a space station on the planet Solaris to rescue a crew of space explorers.
Thus said we see immediately that all the originality is left out of this Cloony- Solaris version.A meager love story...and never coming close to the esoterically bestranening appearances of the Wife in the Tarkovsky film.Somehow Soderbergh needed his film 'to make sense'.
Simply put, this was the worst movie I have ever seen.I usually like George Clooney and cannot imagine why he took this role.
There were about 30 other people in the theater and you could hear everyone commenting on how horrible this film was.Please, save yourself the lost time in your life and DO NOT see this movie..
This film captures that sense of the Great Unknown and twists it into a very moving love story, which revolves around George Clooney's character and his dead wife (the beautiful Natascha McElhone).And at the centre of this film...
. .This film requires and will induce thought.Concepts like define existence, what exactly is death, or life for that matter, is only the beginning edge of where this story takes you, as one follows George Clooney's character out into deep space aboard a corporate financed space station in orbit around Solaris.While living on Earth, he's summoned to go out to the station, to solve a "problem" that no one can understand or even describe .
The chemistry between these two is obvious, but Natascha has her own depth of character complexity that I cannot find words for here, but is absolutely compelling to watch.No, I'm not going to meander down a laundry list of what happens at various key pivot points in this story, as such would be tedious, and hopelessly inadequate to convey the experience this film delivers.From a technical and aesthetic perspective, this is a very beautiful, well crafted example of the artform.
If you want to watch a really good film by this director then look up "the limey" which is a very good film which, like solaris, deals with elements of love and how we deal with it when it has gone.
Soderbergh and Clooney have produced a literate, cerebral, adult film exploring the nature of consciousness, faith, reason, reality and love.In a career best performance, Clooney gives a deep and subtle portrayal of a man emotionally laid bare by the death and seeming resurrection of his wife played by Natascha McElhone.Soderbergh has deliberately gone for a gloomy, moody, restrained feel - think Seven with the rain but without the violence - and the lack of music to drive the plot along adds to the stark and brooding atmosphere.
The film centres around Chris Kelvin(George Clooney) a troubled psychologist sent to a distant research space station, orbiting a peculiar planet called Solaris.
He's sent there to investigate strange occurrences going on with the crew, as they're experiencing possible delusions of people they loved who've passed away, coming back to life.Steven Soderbergh writes and directs this adaption, which helps give the film a singular vision.
Story Something is wrong on the space station orbiting the mysterious planet Solaris, so Chris Kelvin (Clooney) goes there, all alone, to find out what's going on and to persuade the crew to come home.
Just as I feel one should always see the movie and then read the source material in order to savor the deeper experience that comes with the written word, you can always rent and watch the earlier version if you liked this film for a much more rewarding experience.
This film had a retro 70s feel running all the way through it laments back to the days when film-makers were allowed to treat their audiences as adults and the fact they are no longer allowed to do this makes us all poorer for it.For me Clooney has become a great actor and been behind some of the best films of recent years and I think this was his coming of age movie.'Am I alive.
It's pretty dull.The only pluses are the beautiful Natascha McElhone, the set designs, and the interesting sound track by Cliff Martinez, who seems to have made a career scoring films for Steven Soderbergh.The planet somehow is tapping into the humans' minds and creating beings from the images of people in their past.
More like a Tasters Choice commercial in outer space.Really, for all the elegantly written reviews on this site, I cannot find a single redeeming feature in this film.The philosophical exchanges are of a vapid cartoon variety better handled by Woody Allen's paranoid schoolboy in Annie Hall (depressed in the 3rd grade because he knew the universe would end in 3.5 billion years...) Not being a fan of Mr. Clooney's frat-boy style of charisma I had a hard time finding any chemistry between his character & that of Natasha McElhone's.
It's an atheist's movie, I'm sure, but filled with spiritual and human optimism.Most viewers don't know that this is a remake, and hard core film buffs dismiss this American Steven Soderbergh version as Hollywood at its worst (big budget, sentimental, pretty beyond reason).
Steven Sodebergh's script, though lean, does not ignore the the essence of the book, which is that this is a love story, a search for redemption, a second chance, one to undo passed wrongs and mistakes.I won't delve into the plot of the movie or the book, save to say, that many of us could identify with the plight of the principal character, doctor Chris Kelvin (George Clooney), a man beset by the demons of his past.
"Solaris" is a fine example of what true sci-fi can be, and can thus join the pantheon of sci-fi classics as "2001 A Space Odyssey", "Alien", "Blade Runner", "Gattaca", "Dark City", "Strange Days" and others.Natasha McElhone (Rheya) is great (and beautiful) while the rest of the supporting cast is very good (Jeremy Davies is really weird...but in a good way).The soundtrack totally captures the atmosphere and mood of the movie, which is one of melancholy and sadness.
In the end, Solaris was a tedious, boring, confusing at times, uninteresting film about people I couldn't possibly care less about.
In this way, it's a very personal movie.In the end, we don't know much more about the characters than we did at the beginning, and this is a weakness of Solaris.
George Clooney plays astronaut Chris Kelvin who is summoned on a space station floating around the mysterious planet Solaris.
I read the book by Stanislaw Lem just before getting the film, and there are of course elements of the story well explained in the book which were removed from the film - or simply too hard to pump into a film.The plot is the following, people in a space station above the planet Solaris receive "visitors", lifelike persons from their past, all dead already.
The question of their nature, their origin, their purpose is key as they are not aggressive, not "aliens in disguise".George Clooney delivers a good performance and while the film takes us miles away from a typical SF movie into a psychological drama, a debate on reality, love even, I would say that the result is surprisingly good.Still enigmatic, the very nature of Solaris, the nature of the "visitors", only tends to find an explanation through metaphysical and religious terms.
Therefore in my opinion a remake was certainly a good idea to make the story more accessible to people that would not watch, or have not seen this movie.In respect of Solaris 2002, I found this to be an excellent movie.
Anyone who likes this movie and gives it more than, let's say 3 points hasn't seen the Russian 'Solaris', made 30 years ago and 30 times better than this.This movie is just another example how Hollywood takes some European movie, remakes it and thinks it creates gold....
Tarkovsky's is a sci-fi classic and considered by many to be the foreign equivalent to `2001: A Space Odyssey.' Steven Soderbergh (who won Best Director for `Traffic'- itself a remake) refuses to call this `Solaris' a remake, and contends that his film is simply a new adaptation of Lem's novel.Soderbergh's argument is credible, his `Solaris' is almost half the length of Tarkovsky's near 3-hour epic, his screenplay concentrating mostly on the relationship of Rheya and Kelvin.The 1972 version eyes the scientific morals of the mission, something completely missing from the latter movie.
The 2002 `Solaris' is a chilling film with great acting that asks intriguing questions about humanity, space and essentially love itself.
Steve Soderbergh's lastest masterpiece, SOLARIS, ask the question, can a person love a being that looks, acts, and has the memory of a deceased loved one, but really isn't that person?SOLARIS is based on the Stainslaw Lem novel that was made into a long, but very well done film by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky.
Or is this a hallucination that is created by Chris' mind?SOLARIS is like Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, in being a film that is full of philosophic questions.
If you don't like using your brain while watching a movie, then catch the next showing of DIE ANOTHER DAY or MAID IN MANHATTAN.SOLARIS is a film that proves that Steve Soderbergh IS one talented and versatile director.
I was so glad and pleased to see that Soderbergh respected the story and sci-fi genre by making SOLARIS into a highly intellectual film where thoughts are required, characters are the key element to a film, and technology and location are used with what they should be used for, background support!Georgy Clooney proves that he IS one of the best and underrated actors working in Hollywood.
The conception of the planet was very good, very beautiful, but, like much of the film, I think it got away from Soderbergh in the end.