Movie Review: Solaris

Solaris

The people responsible for Solaris read like a who's who of the talented and powerful in Hollywood. The director and writer of the screenplay is Steven Soderbergh. If his name sounds familiar to you, it should. He's the Oscar® winning director of Traffic, the Oscar® nominated director of Erin Brockovich, and the acclaimed director of Ocean's Eleven. James Cameron produced Solaris. Cameron is the creative juggernaut behind the Terminator and Alien franchises and is the Oscar® winning director and writer of Titanic, the highest grossing movie of all time. The star of Solaris is George Clooney, a man honored for his television work as Dr. Doug Ross on "ER" and the winner of a Golden Globe for his brilliant performance in O Brother, Where Art Thou? Thus it was I bought my ticket for Solaris with high hopes. And so it is I'm pained to have to tell you: Solaris sucks.

The time is the near future. The place is a planet called Solaris where scientists in an orbiting space station study the potential of available resources. When a cryptic message is received from the man in charge of the Solaris project and security crews sent to check on the station crew don't return, Dr. Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) is tagged to make the trip. An apparently gifted psychiatrist (we're never really sure whether he's any good or not), Kelvin is suffering his own emotional torment after the death of his young and beautiful wife, Rheya (Natascha McElhone) a few years earlier. Never-the-less, he accepts the challenge and makes his way toward Solaris. Once there, he tries to unravel the mystery that has crewmen Snow (Jeremy Davies) and Gordon (Viola Davis) alternately locking themselves in their quarters and making bizarre claims, and that has killed Kelvin's friend and the mission leader, Gibarian (Ulrich Tukur). Before long, however, Kelvin is caught up in the same surreal circumstances that have apparently driven the others mad.

The premise for Solaris, though a little trite, is workable. The screenplay, direction, and editing, however, are not. Much of the story is told in snippets of film that attempt to appear futuristic or surreal, often with a sort of film noire flavor. What they actually look like, however, is disjointed. The actors are severely limited by a director who apparently tells each to remain completely calm while they express this or that extreme emotion, something Clooney does all too well. Meanwhile, McElhone is a beautiful woman who (again, I blame the direction, not the acting) turns expressions and emotions on and off like a particularly lifelike mechanical doll. Davies is a creditable crazy man, but is given some of the most poorly written lines I've ever heard. Though he gives it the old college try, there's little he can do when virtually every line he says begins with the word "yeah". Davis is good, but the character she's forced to play is one-dimensional and without a sense of adventure or wonder in her body making it impossible to believe she'd be a member of an elite space-going research team.

The space station sets are good; the earthly sets try too hard to look like they've been decorated in the future. The special effects are okay. The physics, of course, is terrible (though that's the case in many science fiction movies and I'm willing to excuse a lot of it under "poetic license"). As a longtime editing fan, I refuse to discuss the editing in this movie. It's too...painful. We do get to see a naked George Clooney (from the back) for a few seconds. It would take a lot more than that, though, to overcome the horrible dialogue and the plodding storyline that is Solaris.

Lady Liberty says: Solaris is rated PG-13. There is some limited sexual content and some moderate violence, but nothing objectionable - except the entire movie - for those age 14 and up.