As a huge title card reads imme­di­ately at the end of the film, Solaris was “writ­ten for the screen and directed by Steven Soder­bergh.” This Dork Reporter is a huge admirer, but that seemed a bit ego­tis­ti­cal even to me. Per­haps an over­en­thu­si­as­tic end-credits designer is to blame? Or maybe the stu­dio wanted to cap­ture some more of that lucra­tive Ocean’s Eleven magic by play­ing up the Soderbergh/Clooney brand?

But writ­ing and direct­ing cred­its, how­ever many feet tall, barely begin to describe Soderbergh’s role. For this and many of his other films, he serves as his own Direc­tor of Pho­tog­ra­phy (and even phys­i­cal cam­era oper­a­tor) under the pseu­do­nym Peter Andrews and also as edi­tor under the name Mary Ann Bernard. So, obvi­ously, Soder­bergh is one of the few main­stream film­mak­ers with the lux­ury of near-total con­trol over his films. Like Kubrick, he pro­duces, writes, directs, oper­ates the cam­era, and edits. But while Kubrick was a con­trol freak (in the best sense), the mod­est Soder­bergh is lauded as being more col­lab­o­ra­tive and espe­cially as a sen­si­tive direc­tor of actors.

Pag­ing Dr. Ross, to the O.R., stat!

The DVD edi­tion includes an excel­lent com­men­tary track of Soder­bergh in con­ver­sa­tion with co-producer James Cameron, the orig­i­nal direc­tor attached to the project. Soder­bergh asks Cameron what he thought of how he approached the mate­r­ial. Cameron points out that Soder­bergh took a more “inter­nal” approach than he would have, and both agree in good humor that Cameron would have included more car chases. More than Soderbergh’s grand total of zero, anyway.

Depend­ing on how you count, Soder­bergh has only directed two remakes: Ocean’s Eleven and Solaris (The Limey was a kind of homage or mash-up remix of the Eng­lish crime clas­sics Point Blank and Get Carter). The source mate­r­ial of the Pol­ish novel Solaris by Stanis­law Lem has proven a rich mine for cin­ema. Russ­ian film­maker Andrei Tarkovsky directed the orig­i­nal adap­ta­tion in 1972 (read The Dork Report review) as the Eurasian answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey (read The Dork Report review). The basic con­cept also drove films as diverse as Paul W.S. Anderson’s Event Hori­zon (which is hor­ri­ble but has uncom­monly spec­tac­u­lar spe­cial effects and art direc­tion) and Danny Boyle’s Sun­shine. Soderbergh’s ver­sion of Solaris is cred­ited as being based more on the orig­i­nal novel the 1972 film, with barely a men­tion of Tarkovsky even in the DVD com­men­tary track. In his essay for the 2002 Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion edi­tion of the orig­i­nal Solaris, Phillip Lopate states that Lem was unhappy with Tarkovsky’s inter­pre­ta­tion, and was look­ing for­ward to what he expected to be a more faith­ful trans­la­tion by Soderbergh.

Natascha McEl­hone doesn’t like the looks of this tan­ning booth

Solaris is set at an unspec­i­fied point in the future, dis­tant enough for human­ity to have per­fected the tech­nol­ogy to leave the solar sys­tem. Kelvin (George Clooney) is a shrink who is him­self deeply emo­tion­ally dam­aged. Indeed, the theme of both this and the orig­i­nal film could be summed up as “physi­cian heal thy­self.” We first see him host­ing a group ther­apy ses­sion for sur­vivors of an unspec­i­fied tragedy. Since the movie was released in 2002, it’s pos­si­ble this was intended as an anal­ogy to a 9/11-like event. But judg­ing by how every scene set on Earth is drenched in dark­ness and per­sis­tent rain, per­haps there was some kind of eco­log­i­cal catastrophe.

Sin­gle and with no fam­ily, Kelvin is an ideal can­di­date for a solo trip to inves­ti­gate mys­te­ri­ous goings-on in a space sta­tion orbit­ing the dis­tant gas giant Solaris (pay atten­tion for the brief cameo by John Cho as a gov­ern­men­tal emis­sary). Unlike Tarkovski’s extremely leisurely pace, this ver­sion wastes no time; Kelvin’s boots are on the space sta­tion less than 10 min­utes into the film. This is the point where any read­ers wary of spoil­ers ought to stop reading.

Kelvin encoun­ters Snow (Jeremy Davies, supremely well-cast), a man under­stand­ably gone stir-crazy from being cooped up on a haunted space sta­tion. But it becomes clear that he him­self may be one of the forces doing the haunt­ing. Evi­dently, the planet Solaris some­how draws upon the strongest emo­tional res­o­nances in vis­i­tors’ brains and man­i­fests them as liv­ing beings. These incar­na­tions are most decid­edly not a bless­ing for any­one. For Clooney, it’s an echo of his dead wife Rheya (Natascha McEl­hone); for the cap­tain Gibar­ian (Ulrich Tukur), it’s a copy of the son he left behind on earth; for Snow, it’s… another ver­sion of him­self. The “Snow” that Clooney meets is, in effect, his own ghost; he killed his own cre­ator within sec­onds of his birth. The faux Snow’s weird behav­ior is not that of a man gone mad but of a not totally fully-formed human bluff­ing his way through unfa­mil­iar human inter­ac­tion. One has to won­der what kind of man is so alone or self-obsessed that the most impor­tant per­son encoded in his emo­tional mem­o­ries is himself.

The Solaris crew rehearses its big tech­nob­a­b­ble scene

Kelvin and Rheya orig­i­nally bonded over the Dylan Thomas verse “and death shall have no domin­ion,” but the emo­tion­ally frag­ile woman com­mit­ted sui­cide after he left her. Tor­tured by the renewed pres­ence of her in his life, and the per­plex­ing puz­zle of Snow’s dop­pel­gänger, he begins to ques­tion his own exis­tence: is he some­one else’s ghost? But he doesn’t take the ques­tion to the next log­i­cal step: is there any­one in the world with enough emo­tional invest­ment in him to cause him to haunt them?

Solaris is both Soder­bergh and Clooney’s first and only sci­ence fic­tion. It was mar­keted with a mis­lead­ing poster sug­gest­ing a romance while obscur­ing any hint of sci­ence fic­tion. It is admit­tedly kind of funny to see Clooney in a space­suit, espe­cially when he was rel­a­tively early in his career as a movie actor (after years in tele­vi­sion sit­coms and dra­mas). One can’t imag­ine Clooney’s Hol­ly­wood ances­tor Cary Grant appear­ing in a space opera. But Solaris tries to have it both ways: to be some­how above sci­ence fic­tion but still be over­loaded with enough pseudo-scientific tech­nob­a­b­ble to fill sev­eral Star Trek epics. The sen­si­tive, emo­tional tone of the film is shat­tered as soon as sci­en­tist Gor­don (Viola Davis) starts lec­tur­ing the audi­ence about pro­ton beams break­ing up fields of Higgs Par­ti­cles (or some­thing along those lines). Such tech­nob­a­b­ble cheap­ens the premise. Indeed, the talky screen­play makes every­thing too explicit and con­crete, espe­cially com­pared to 2001: A Space Odyssey, which says so much more with so many fewer words.

Offi­cial movie site: www.solaristhemovie.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.