Solaris

Some time in the future, Chris Kelvin (George Clooney), a widowed psychologist, is urged by his old friend, Gibarion (Ulrich Tukur), to come urgently to the space station Prometheus, where something is terribly wrong.

Still grieving over the loss, by suicide, of his wife, Rheya (Natascha McElhone), Kelvin arrives at the space station, which is orbiting the mysterious planet, Solaris. Here he finds his friend, Gibarian, dead and the two surviving crew members, Dr. Gordon (Viola Davis), and Snow (Jeremy Davies), behaving very strangely. Kelvin himself begins to be haunted by Rheya, or by someone exactly like her.

Steven Soderbergh's anti-sci-fi film is based on the novel by Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, which also inspired the amazing 1972 film by Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky. Despite the story's complexity, Soderbergh actually simplifies the material; his film is about an hour shorter than Tarkovsky's, and lacks some of the earlier film's most powerful elements, including its amazing final shot.

Soderbergh is more interested in the central relationship between Kelvin and the woman he loves, and that makes the film more accessible than the more intellectual Russian version, though it is still not exactly the kind of space travel movie most fans of the genre will be looking for.

Beautifully photographed by the director himself, and making little of the space-ship sets in which most of it unfolds, this eerie drama has two very strong central performances from Clooney and McElhone. But the weakness of Jeremy Davies is a drawback; every scene in which this very mannered actor appears represents a drop in voltage.

Solaris survives this piece of mis-casting, though it probably won't be to everyone's taste.