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In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Blistering performances.

I have not seen the original...yet. So no comparison here. The whole movie I was thinking "this is flat" "this has no depth". Great visuals, score is only so-so. Acting was subdued, on purpose no doubt. Then came the positive but detached feeling afterwards. The is a mildly uplifting movie but in a out-of-body-feeling way. Watch it. Hang with it until the end. A nice job all the way around and a movie the feels like nothing else I've seen.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. This movie was a Top #250 film on IMDb in 2015, and now registers a '6.2' rating as I write this. Funny what a difference a couple of years make with the inclusion of additional visitors to the title.Before watching this picture I had no knowledge of the novel by Stanislaw Lem or the original Russian movie based on it. So without contaminating my review with the perspectives of those two works, what I thought started out as a pretty good sci-fi mystery turned into an illogical love story aboard a space station. I thought there were all kinds of problems here, principally starting with the main character, Chris Kelvin (George Clooney). He was introduced as an intellectual and level headed psychiatrist who was invited to Solaris because of unexplained occurrences that were driving the scientists on board insane. Fair enough, but when he himself experiences the impossible, he abruptly turns off his brain in order to resume a failed relationship with the woman who was his wife (Natascha McElhone) on Earth. Why? How does that even make sense? There's also inconsistency with the character of Rheya. The 'first' Rheya who appears on Solaris has memories of her past with Kelvin, but the 'second' Rheya' doesn't. Until she does again when flashes of life on Earth intrude on her memory. I'm really bothered by internal consistencies in a story, and the two I just mentioned were big time ones.What I really like about well written sci-fi flicks though, is the scientific gobbledy-gook that writers come up with in service to a story. You could have blown me away with that description of the Higgs device - a high energy proton accelerator with a matter phase modulator, which by adjusting the tuning frequency, you could get an enhancement of Higgs anti-bosons at ninety gigahertz, and even better, an almost pure beam at a hundred sixty gigahertz.See, if I were writing the story, Kelvin could have saved himself a lot of trouble by cranking up the Higgs to a full one eighty, thereby reversing the mass exponentiality of the Solaris gravitational field. Then, by switching to decoupled internal power, he could have calibrated the external high-grain antenna and set a course back to Earth, one that wouldn't have jeopardized the possibility of bringing an alien life force back with him. If he wanted to see Rheya again, he could have depressurized the spin turbines on the Athena, settled back with a brandy, and made love to his heart's content. I guess the simplest explanation is just too obvious.

Once again we have people complaining about their boredom. It's so slow. A true psychological drama may appear slow because the person watching has such a short attention span and a limited world view. There, I've said it, Mister 1 out of 10. I prefer the Russian version of this book by Stanislaw Lem, but this is a worthy interpretation. The planet Solaris has an affect on anyone that approaches it. It is a sentient organism and so it isn't there to be exploited; it's there to protect itself. When George Clooney's character is called to investigate the goings on at a space station that has been set up to investigate access to a water planet, he walks into a surreal mass of images and tricks. Something is causing personages to appear on board the space station. A child who should not be there runs down a hallway. People are committing suicide or running away, frightened or overwhelmed by emotions. Clooney, despite being a rock, still succumbs to the planet's trickery because of his great love for his lost wife. I often like to look to movies for an intellectual challenge. It doesn't always work, but there are few that don't offer something to think about.

There are some interesting themes in the film - and in many ways, this is an outer space version of Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind with a few Vanilla Sky time-line distortions mixed in for good measure. Each of these three films was exploring similar ideas at around the same time.Who hasn't butchered a fantastic relationship and wished there was a way to go back and make better decisions?Solaris resonated with me in that I found it to be about second chances with a love that went from perfect to tragic, and the idea that what may have accelerated the deterioration may have as much to do with people's perceptions of one another as much as the situation itself.As for the suggestions that there are too many unexplained occurrences throughout the movie, such is life.Peace Richard