In space, no one can hear you scream -- or yawn, for that matter.
Steven Soderbergh's Solaris is a tedious, self-indulgent attempt to revisit Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Soderbergh based his screenplay on the novel by Stanislaw Lem and the 1972 Russian film by Andrei Tarkovsky, which runs almost three hours.
Soderbergh's clocks in at around 90 minutes but feels like three hours because the pace is excruciatingly slow.
Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) is a psychiatrist who is trying to cope with the suicide of his wife Rheya (Natascha McElhone) when he's assigned to visit the space station Prometheus and investigate the strange behaviour of its crew as they circle the planet Solaris.
As Kelvin boards Prometheus and speaks with the two surviving crew members, it's clear something is very wrong: Snow (Jeremy Davies) is almost serene whereas Helen Gordon (Viola Davis) is so terrified she locks herself in her living compartment.
Kelvin is understandably baffled, but when his dead wife appears, disbelief gives way to horror.
Solaris is part love story and part cautionary morality tale.
Soderbergh seems to be saying that in life in general, and love in particular, we are condemned to repeat our mistakes.
Kelvin knows he alienated his wife back on Earth and finds himself doing the same to her clone in space. He's being given a second chance but he doesn't know how to break the mould.
His benefactor in this experiment is none other than Solaris itself, which is not a planet at all but an intelligence.
Soderbergh may be reaching for the profundity of 2001: A Space Odyssey but he gets no further than old Star Trek episodes.
Clooney tries desperately to make Kelvin's dilemma seem immediate and compelling but his performance is as robotic as his character.
The film has a classic sci-fi look and its use of music is hypnotic, but for all its pretense to be a love story, it's a movie about ideas and concepts rather than people.
In the press notes for Solaris, Soderbergh says "this movie is not an action film ... This is science fiction the way science fiction used to be back in the '50s and '60s when it was a fiction of ideas."
Soderbergh is true to his promise.
His film is almost completely void of action and its themes are purposely obscure.
If it's difficult to believe Solaris was made by the man who helmed Ocean's Eleven, Traffic, Out of Sight and Erin Brockovich, just remember he was also responsible for the muddled Kafka and the pretentious Full Frontal.
(This film is rated AA)
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