After the fiasco of his last film Full Frontal, I actually swore off ever seeing another Steven Soderbergh film again. Despite that I knew that his remake of Solaris was also on the way, and I was curious to see what his take on the story would be. And so, though my instinct told me to avoid it, I went along to see it.

I really need to listen to my instincts more often.

Solaris is based upon the book of the same name by Polish SF writer Stanislaw Lem, and the story tells of strange events upon a space station orbiting a planet that may be a sentient being. The previous film version of that book, made in 1972 by Andrei Tarkovsky, was described as Russia's answer to 2001, although Tarkovsky disputed this and claimed he thought 2001 was too sterile and mechanical. In response he made a film that you could argue was also fairly sterile and mechanical. At any rate it was a fairly unconventional SF film, and I think a number of people including myself find it pretty hard going.

The good news is that Soderbergh's Solaris runs over an hour less than Tarkovsky's. The bad news is that it drags just about as much.

On top of that, Soderbergh's handling of the material is just plain clumsy. For example, when George Clooney's character Chris Kelvin arrives as the Solaris space station, he is mystified by a number of bloodstains that appear on the bulkheads. These are then ignored completely through the rest of the film, until near the end when Soderbergh appears to have decided he'd better throw in a random explanation for them with no necessary connection to the actual plot.

The same goes for the conclusion to the film that follows that scene. Needless to say, Soderbergh's ending is somewhat different from that of Tarkovsky, who somehow avoided feeling a need to spice up the film by introducing a somewhat half-arsed action climax that comes out of nowhere and also has no necessary connection to the actual plot either.

On a technical level Solaris isn't too bad. The cinematography is by Soderbergh himself, though credited to a pseudonym. The planet itself looks better than the one in the Tarkovsky film as well. Otherwise, it's not an enticing prospect. The storytelling is slightly fractured and badly explained, particularly at the beginning; some scenes probably won't make much sense at all on their own if you haven't seen the Russian film or read the book first. Natascha McElhone, who plays Kelvin's mysteriously reincarnated wife, takes what few acting honours there are. George Clooney just isn't interesting, and Viola Davis and Jeremy Davies as the two remaining crew members of the space station are just irritating.

In short, Solaris is a film dealing with some very intriguing ideas and issues, and a film which unfortunately handles those ideas and issues so badly that the end result just ends up looking like a mass of pretentious tripe. Not recommended at all.