The True Solaris Is the Fake Solaris

Andrei Tarkovsky’s glacially slow, cryptically self-referential film Solaris is an idiosyncratic masterpiece in no need of a reboot. And yet, the film’s also about the human capacity for, and desire for, superfluous duplication. In that sense, Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 remake isn’t necessary, but is nonetheless all the more in the spirit of the original’s vision of reality, and of itself, by being an ersatz copy.

Soderbergh’s Solaris, like Tarkovsky’s (and like the 1961 Stanislaw Lem novel on which both are based) features as protagonist Kris Kelvin (George Clooney), a near-future psychologist summoned to aid with a space mission on the distant planet of Solaris. When Kelvin arrives on the space station in orbit around Solaris, he discovers that his friend Dr. Gibarian (Ulrich Tukur) has committed suicide. Other scientists have been visited by mysterious apparitions from their past, seemingly generated by the planet. Kelvin’s visitor is his deceased ex-wife Rheya (Natascha McElhone), who killed herself some years before. Though he realizes she isn’t human, Kelvin wants to return with her to earth.

Though the film’s pacing is slow, it doesn’t have the estranging immobility of Tarkovsky. Instead, Soderbergh creates a sense of alienation by omitting detail, explanation, and exposition from the narrative, and through the use of unconventional framing and editing. Scenes end abruptly and without warning and the camera lingers on the ceiling or on walls, only slowly tracking around to find human figures off to the side, almost incidental to the action.

The sense of alienation is in part replicating, or imitating, the experience of grief. Kelvin’s haunted by Rheya, both literally and figuratively. Some of the film’s most indelibly disturbing moments are painful metaphors for loss—such as the scene in which Rheya on the space station reenacts her suicide, drinking liquid oxygen—and then resurrects, twitching and gasping as the scars on her face disappear. Just as she dies and dies and dies and then walks again in Kelvin’s memory, so she repeatedly tortures herself, and him, on the space station. You can’t kill a memory, no matter how much it hurts.

The film isn’t just about grief, though. It’s also about film. The visitors look like people, talk like people, and act like people, but they’re just projections of people’s fantasies and memories—which you could also say of the people you see in movies. When fake Rheya leaves a goodbye message for Kris, she does it by video, so the last he sees of her is a projection of a projection, a self-imitating self-imitation. “We don’t want other worlds, we want mirrors” a maybe dream, maybe projection, maybe real Gibarian tells Kelvin. He could be talking about space exploration, but could also be talking about the movies—those dreams that promise to take us to the distant stars and keep showing us the same huge faces looming over us, our skulls as big as the universe.

In this case, the huge face belongs to George Clooney, whose pensive jawline and haunted eyes draw Soderbergh’s camera with a magnetizing intensity that echoes the way that Kelvin himself keeps imagining and reimagining Rheya’s enormous, eloquent eyes. Clooney’s presence and celebrity is central to the film’s impact and to its thematic resonance; if Rheya is Clooney’s dream, Clooney is ours—a cathexis of desire, fascination and meaning which is simultaneously repetitive, banal, and otherworldly. In Lem and Tarkovsky the mystery of the universe has no answer because humans are unable to see beyond the limits of their own consciousness and dreams. In Soderbergh, humans can’t see beyond the limits of their own consciousness and dreams—and therefore the answer to the mystery of the universe is George Clooney.

You could argue that turning Solaris into a celebrity vehicle cheapens it, and wouldn’t be wrong. But a film about the way the universe is our sad pasteboard imitation of the universe is arguably more itself—more pasteboard—when it’s cheapened. Soderbergh’s Hollywood turn led him away from his own vision in many ways. Solaris brilliantly addresses that by using Hollywood shibboleth Clooney as a repetitive symbol of the limitation of all human vision. The inevitable and yet inscrutable happy ending sits there, part apotheosis, part rebuke, as if we’ve discovered, like Soderbergh, that the only way to find both heaven and our true selves is by selling out.