Solaris (2002)

Often regarded as the Soviet response to Stanley Kubrick's 2001, Andrei Tarkovsky's adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's novel is a difficult, challenging piece of science fiction, moving at a deliberate pace and encouraging the viewer to think and reflect. Not, then, the most obvious choice for a Hollywood remake.

But Steven Soderbergh has never been the typical Hollywood director, happily mixing up mainstream crowd pleasers like Erin Brokovich and Out of Sight with low-key indies like The Limey and even borderline experimental pieces like Full Frontal.

Unfortunately, even he really seems to have bitten off more than he can chew this time.

It's not the story, which is straightforward enough: Chris Kelvin (George Clooney), distraught following his wife Rheya (Natascha McElhone)'s suicide, nevertheless accepts a mission to find out what has happened to the crew of a space station orbiting the planet Solaris. Kelvin arrives to find the station's captain – an old friend – dead and one of the two surviving crew members, Snow, somewhat unhinged. Then Rheya appears. The other crew member, the hard-headed Gordon, tells Kelvin that Rheya is not the real Rheya, being only a physical manifestation of Kelvin's memories brought into being by the sentient Solaris, and urges Chris to let her destroy it. Chris, however, is reluctant, wanting to know more about his wife's suicide and the argument that precipitated it…

It's simply that Hollywood audiences – or more specifically the post-Star Wars, post-Matrix audience – were never going to be interested in a philosophical science fiction movie with absolutely no action, George Clooney's arse or not.

While Soderbergh has sliced a good hour of his film's duration compared to Tarkovsky's original by getting Kelvin to the space station with almost indecent haste, its basic fidelity in other regards – the drab, washed out colours and omnipresent rain of earth – ensures it unpalatability to the mainstream.

Clooney is not so much cool as frozen, paralyzed, while McElhone is too neurotic to attract much audience sympathy.

Jeremy Davies's tic-laden performance, meanwhile, imparts an unfortunate air of Dark Star to the procedings – unfortunate in that at least John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon's film was trying for laughs when it came to philosophy.

Solaris's saving grace is Cliff Martinez's very fine minimalistic score. Whether he was on board from the start or if Soderbergh only turned to his long-term collaborator after first giving David Holmes a shot, I don't know. Whatever the case, it works, though doubtless the record companies won't find the Solaris OST flying off the shelves in quite the same manner as Ocean's Eleven…

Solaris isn't a bad film, more one that's going to be too arthouse for some and too mainstream for others.