Perfect cast and a good story

A different way of telling a story

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

A gathering of geniuses: Stanislaw Lem, Andrei Tarkovsky, Steven Soderbergh and James Cameron. Although I admire Tarkovsky, Soderbergh and Cameron have made a film that is better than the original and that is almost a miracle. Everything here is perfect - I consider this film the best work of Soderbergh and Cameron and I doubt they will surpass what they did here in the future. Tarkovsky is not capable of making a bad film so imagine how hard it is to surpass him - and that has happened here.

Once again we have people complaining about their boredom. It's so slow. A true psychological drama may appear slow because the person watching has such a short attention span and a limited world view. There, I've said it, Mister 1 out of 10. I prefer the Russian version of this book by Stanislaw Lem, but this is a worthy interpretation. The planet Solaris has an affect on anyone that approaches it. It is a sentient organism and so it isn't there to be exploited; it's there to protect itself. When George Clooney's character is called to investigate the goings on at a space station that has been set up to investigate access to a water planet, he walks into a surreal mass of images and tricks. Something is causing personages to appear on board the space station. A child who should not be there runs down a hallway. People are committing suicide or running away, frightened or overwhelmed by emotions. Clooney, despite being a rock, still succumbs to the planet's trickery because of his great love for his lost wife. I often like to look to movies for an intellectual challenge. It doesn't always work, but there are few that don't offer something to think about.

Yes. I mean that. Viewers want to see explosions, murder and mayhem. Not unanswered questions and thought experiments. This movie will give you plenty of those. A typical quote from the movie is "There are no answers. Only choices." Now how many of us have the patience to think about that one? This movie challenges us to sit still for a minute and really listen to what the characters are saying and what it could possibly mean. I thought the acting was excellent given the complexity of what Stanislaw Lem was trying to convey. If he was trying to convey existential crisis, I think the movie succeeds. I loved the touch of making one of the scientists a strong black woman. I watched the original Russian version (1972) before trying to digest the newer one. The newer one resonated with me more. Perhaps because it is more current - perhaps because the in Russian version I had more trouble understanding the timelines and how they fit it - until the end. In the American movie, the timelines make more sense but there is no twist at the end. The last few minutes become predictable. I also found the Russian version much more difficult to relate to emotionally though. I don't know how either movie compares to the book, but that will be my next stop.

I have both this and Tarkovsky's version of Stanislaw Lem's novel. I found both of them to be somewhat of a trial, although for slightly different reasons. Both are slow, and unless you are easily confused and generally clueless, they don't actually have much of a mystery to them because the secret of the "mystery" is kind of obvious very early on. Where this one fails compared to the 1972 version is that the science fiction is merely a shallow vehicle for a rather stodgy and slow treatment of a doomed romance. There's no actual science in the story at all. It's full of rather obvious logical flaws which distract from the story. There's also little to no science fiction in this version, since it revolves almost entirely about a lonely man's inability to deal with the loss of the difficult and rather fay woman he loved; the science fiction, such as it is, merely provides a pretty backdrop and an excuse for a series of dull flashbacks to the highlights of their relationship. Where the modern remake scores over Tarkovsky's film is that it's about an hour shorter, which means you can get it over and done with that much quicker. On the balance I found the modern take to be more accessible, the only problem being the lack of interest in what you are able to access.To sum up: if you're a science fiction fan rather than a fan of romantic drama, don't bother. If you're a fan of slow, dense, intense romantic dramas with troubled characters who sit staring into space for unreasonable amounts of time, and with stories which have pretensions of being intellectual, then you will probably enjoy this.The seven points I'm giving it are for a good cast who put in decent performances despite the stodgy material, and for fairly decent production values. I feel like I'm being overly generous and it actually doesn't deserve more than 6 points, but what the hell. At least they tried hard.