- Despite its positive critical reputation, I must admit that I now officially have no desire to read Stanislaw Lem's novel Solaris. I've seen both the Andrey Tarkovsky film version, also critically acclaimed, and the slightly less revered Steven Soderbergh interpretation, and I found both of them to be tremendously disappointing. Actually, I found Tarkovsky's version to be intolerably dull and Soderbergh's version merely to be annoyingly uninteresting. Maybe this is just one of those unfilmable novels that actually is worth reading, but I'm not sure I can bring myself to encounter the material a third time to find out.
- The story follows a psychologist named Kelvin (George Clooney) who gets dispatched to a space station orbiting the eponymous planet Solaris to investigate some strange goings-on. Upon arrival, he finds that his onetime friend Dr. Gibarian (Ulrich Tukur) killed himself shortly after sending a vague distress signal to Earth. The only two surviving crew members, both scientists, are an eccentric named Snow (Jeremy Davies) who can't articulate what's happening on the station and a recluse named Gordon (Viola Davis) who initially refuses to leave her room. That Gibarian's young son and Kelvin's deceased wife Rheya (Natascha McElhone) also appear on the station suggests that something cosmically mysterious is afoot.
- But lest you imagine that this is one of those solvable mysteries, let me assure you that the audience never really finds out what's happening. Obviously the beautifully rendered (and apparently highly magnetized) planet is generating imitation people from the crew members' memories, but that's roughly where my understanding or appreciation of affairs ends. Why it would do this is anybody's guess, and that, I'm afraid, is the film's allegedly big idea. Despite Soderbergh's capable direction, decent acting from everyone, and an appropriately eerie score by Cliff Martinez, the movie's half-baked philosophy is as unsatisfying as the idea that you can interact with neutrino-people in the first place. Or maybe I'm just inaccurately remembering that I didn't like it and...oh, just shut up!
- The imitation people are made of neutrinos confined by a Higgs field, which apparently means that you can have sex with them. So I guess these are hot neutrinos and definitely not sterile. Particle physics humor!
