Direction: Steven Soderbergh, Andrei Tarkovsky Starring: George Clooney, Natascha McElhone, Jeremy Davies, Viola Davis, Ulrich Tukur.
Once and a while a film will come out that will sort of change the way you look at movies. But also, these films evoke emotions and feelings out of you that you may not be able to easily explain or back up. Solaris is a remake to a 1972 film of the same name. While I have not seen the original, seeing Steven Soderbergh's updated version makes me want to. The writer/director is famous for specific filmmaking flair in his productions, and here, this flair comes close to an almost modern day version of 2001. While I have not seen all of A Space Odyssey, I've seen clips and Soderbergh obviously was going for a similar movie going experience. In Solaris, the director goes for a very slow pace where acting and moods take the attention of the viewer. It is not a special effects feature as we might expect coming from producer James Cameron. Instead, Soderbergh decides to go with the big risk and attempts to reach what filmmaking is all about. The problem with this approach is that Solaris is only for a restricted group of people.
Set in the near future, Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) is a sullen psychologist asked by an old friend (Ulrich Tukur) via videotape to travel to a space station orbiting the distant planet of Solaris and investigate a problem the inhabitants have encountered. Once onboard, Kelvin finds only two survivors, Snow (Jeremy Davies) and Dr. Gordon (Viola Davis), both of whom are for some reason resisting their return to Earth. Upon waking up from sleep, Kelvin is visited by his wife, Rheya (Natascha McElhone), who has been dead for several years. She is not a figment of his imagination, nor is she necessarily the same woman he was married to, so what, exactly, is she? Despite looking and sounding like Rheya, and having all of her memories, Kelvin at first resists her return, and then starts to believe it may be his only chance to right the wrongs he made when she was with him on Earth.
