Solaris (2002)

Chris Kelvin (George Clooney), a psychiatrist who has recently lost his wife, Rheya (Natascha McElhone) is summoned to a space station orbiting a mysterious planet by the commander who cryptically comments that he is the only one who can help them. Instead of finding people when he arrives at the station he finds blood stained decks and 2 dead bodies in storage, including the Commander. But the station is not deserted after all. He finds two surviving crew members, including one who will not leave her room and will not let him enter it. The other crew member is not able to explain what happened and asks him how long he can stay awake. Hilarity ensues when Kelvin wakes up the next morning to the touch of his dead wife, who doesn't remember how she got there.

Trivia: Was originally given an R rating by the MPAA primarily due to a pair of shots of George Clooney's nude rear end. Steven Soderbergh appealed the decision, citing that similar content (and worse) had appeared on network television. Soderbergh won the appeal and the movie was granted a PG-13 rating. One of the proposed taglines for this film was, "Love never dies". However, this same tagline had already been used for Dracula. This is over an hour shorter than the original version, Andrei Tarkovsky's Solyaris (1972). The verse of poetry spoken by Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) is a poem by Dylan Thomas called "And Death Shall Have no Dominion".

Thinking back on this film after a few days makes me realize that there really wasn't much to this movie at all. The whole premise is that something on the planet (I thought it was a star) is reading their minds and creating surrogate visitors for them based on the memories it finds. This would be good science fiction if they found out that the visitors could communicate or they were exploratory probes trying to find out about the humans, but they weren't, they were just instantly created people who could heal themselves almost instantly. And they didn't seem to want to be there willingly going to their destruction once they found out what they were, including Rheya. Speaking of the visitors, we never figure out who Gordon (Viola Davis)'s visitor is, we don't even see them. Because of this we can only guess that the visitor that is create for you is the one person you really long for or missed, i.e. dead wife. (of course that doesn't explain the revelation that Snow (Jeremy Davies) is actually a visitor and that he killed the real Snow (why would you long for yourself or miss yourself?)) Also nobody ever seems to be in any danger. They are a a remote space station were people are going crazy and killing themselves (although all three of the survivors seem very lucid) nobody is panicking. The visitors don't try to interfere with them leaving at the end. So there is no conflict. The only interesting part is the morality issue, the visitors are live beings, should they be destroyed, but that is solved when it appears they are more eager to destroy themselves then the real humans are to destroy them. Cool looking planet though. Now I have to watch the hour longer original version seeing as it is now on the top 250 list. I sure hope it is better.