#67 Solaris

Solaris (2002)

Dir: Steven Soderbergh

Quite a different Soderbergh film!

Solaris sees George Clooney playing Dr. Chris Kelvin, a psychologist who is asked by a friend to come to a space station that’s orbiting a planet called Solaris, that is being studied. The reason is not given in detail at this point, just that there’s an unexplained phenomenon that’s side tracking their studies and causing the astronauts not wanting to return to Earth. So Kelvin goes on a solo trip to the space station, and find’s when he gets there that the phenomenon is that copies of people are materializing from the crews memories, a serious moral dilemma that he can only fully understand when he wakes up next to his wife… who really shouldn’t be there!

This shouldn’t be confused with the previous adaptation of the novel by Stanisław Lem, which was directed in 1972 by Andrei Tarkovsky. Apparently that’s a really good film, and I will endeavour to see it sometime this year, just maybe not yet until I’ve quite gotten my head around this one first.

I’m not certain quite what to say, except that this is a real mind-bender of a film, with a storyline that twists and turns around itself, especially in the end, so you think you’ve got it all figured out and then are thrown back into confusion again for a bit. That’s no flaw though, I like a film that makes you watch it in a completely different way on repeat viewings, and I am certain this will.