At the Movies - 'Solaris'

The Associated Press

After three big hits, Steven Soderbergh is in danger of reverting to being a filmmaker churning out interesting, unusual movies that no one wants to see.

"Full Frontal," his venture into star-powered minimalist filmmaking, quickly vanished last summer, but with a tiny budget, it was a virtually risk-free affair.

Now comes the big-budgeted "Solaris," an admirable attempt at science fiction for the thinking person. Unfortunately, while Soderbergh aims for deep thought, "Solaris" is shallow of mind and feels so clinically detached that it rarely resonates emotionally.

George Clooney -- Soderbergh's producing partner and star of two of his previous movies, the acclaimed flop "Out of Sight" and the glitzy hit "Ocean's Eleven" -- anchors "Solaris" with a subtle, brooding performance. And the film is a visual treat, the cloistered space-station setting and languid visual effects creating a sense of alien menace without ray guns, exploding starships or other typical sci-fi trappings.

All the movie really offers is mood, though. "Solaris" is the cinematic equivalent of ambient music -- a steady, droning pulse with no low points but no particular high spots, either.

"Solaris" is based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem, whose provocative book was previously adapted in a much longer and more engrossing version by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972.

Clooney plays Chris Kelvin, a psychologist in some indeterminate future when humanity has ventured to other planets. One of them is Solaris, where a small group of scientists has gone bonkers while studying the turgid, incomprehensible alien intelligence that coats the planet's surface.

Kelvin comes to investigate, finding his old pal Gibarian (Ulrich Tukur) dead and surviving crew members Snow (Jeremy Davies) and Gordon (Viola Davis) behaving psychotically because visitors from their past have been fabricated out of their subconscious nooks and crannies by Solaris.

After a nap, Kelvin awakens to find his own unwanted guest, a facsimile of his wife, Rheya (Natascha McElhone), who killed herself years earlier after the two had a fight.

While the three scientists ponder the nature of their visitors and how to get rid of them, Kelvin gradually comes to view this manifestation of Rheya as a second chance with his lost love.

Soderbergh departs sharply from Lem's story, fleshing out Kelvin and Rheya's back-story with bland flashbacks to their earlier life together, and Soderbergh's variation on the ending amounts to New Age mush.

Lem's philosophizing on humanity's place in the cosmos and his theories on what truly drives explorers to gaze skyward were preserved in absorbing exchanges in Tarkovsky's version. Soderbergh's "Solaris" reduces Lem's intriguing thoughts to shorthand, quick asides slipped in between unremarkable romantic interludes.

The focus for Soderbergh is the love story, yet it's such a muted ghost of a romance that no sparks fly, whether in Kelvin's flashbacks to the real Rheya or his relationship with her doppelganger.

Soderbergh struggled for years on idiosyncratic, often worthy projects that failed to find an audience, among them "King of the Hill," "Kafka" and "Out of Sight," his first big-budget film.

"Ocean's Eleven," "Erin Brockovich" and "Traffic," the latter earning Soderbergh a best-director Academy Award, gave the filmmaker the box-office clout to experiment with such projects as "Full Frontal" or "Solaris."

Now Soderbergh needs to guard against straying back too often into purely artistic pursuits that lack commercial appeal.

"Solaris," a 20th Century Fox release, is rated PG-13 for sexuality-nudity, brief language and thematic elements.

Running time: 98 minutes.

Two stars out of four.