To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

Blistering performances.

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.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

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.

A gathering of geniuses: Stanislaw Lem, Andrei Tarkovsky, Steven Soderbergh and James Cameron. Although I admire Tarkovsky, Soderbergh and Cameron have made a film that is better than the original and that is almost a miracle. Everything here is perfect - I consider this film the best work of Soderbergh and Cameron and I doubt they will surpass what they did here in the future. Tarkovsky is not capable of making a bad film so imagine how hard it is to surpass him - and that has happened here.

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

Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) is approached to join a crew on board a space station. The crew are studying a phenomenon known as Solaris and Kelvin is asked to join the remaining crew members to discover what is going on there and also to recover the remaining crew members - only two crew members remain on the space station as the other members of the crew have either committed suicide or simply disappeared - this includes the Security Task Force who were originally assigned to the task. What seems like a seemingly ordinary task for Kelvin soon proves difficult when he witnesses the phenomena of Solaris first-hand.Solaris markets itself as a film full of intrigue and mystery, but the reality here is that it isn't really any of these things. Here are some of the problems;For a start, all the characters are bland here with Doctor Snow starting every sentence with the words 'Hmmm' 'Yeah' 'Well' 'Hey'. He never has anything interesting or useful to say (although him being part of Solaris all along does explain why), but even so as a character he annoyed the hell out of me - he both sounded and looked like a stoner. Doctor Gordon was given very little screen time and as a result made very little impact on the film. Clooney and McElhone were sleepwalking through the film most of the time, but I think this was due to the dull script which clearly limited their performances. The dialogue was also dull and rather meaningless for the most part.The bulk of the film revolves around Kelvin and his wife Rheya (Natascha McElhone). The film flits between his memories of their time together and his existence with a carbon copy of his wife that has been created by Solaris. This could potentially have been interesting, but Soderbergh seemed more pre-occupied with giving the film long silly dream sequences which often contain little narrative content meaning that the film often seems pretentious rather than insightful or interesting. Another thing that angered me about the film is the sheer arrogance of the whole thing; I got the impression that Soderbergh genuinely believes that he's actually made something clever and thought-provoking when in reality that just isn't the case. I suppose the only thing that can really be taken away from this is that it asks the question 'If you had another chance to go back and put things right would you do it?', but this whole concept is tackled in such a boring manner that I just didn't really care by the end.It's no surprise that the critics mostly gushed over this as it's the sort of film that they can claim that they get because it's deep and meaningful and intelligent and that if you're thick you won't get it. All I'll say is that I did understand what the film was trying to say, but still thought that it was a pretentious load of baloney.