SUN SCORE

**1/2

Steven Soderbergh's Solaris is an uptight movie - the opposite of his scintillating Out of Sight. Caution and pretension afflict this usually quicksilver director. Under the burden of creating a metaphysical sci-fi picture, he doesn't leave room for jokes, jittery action or erotic tension; the film's only real poetry, visual or verbal, is quoted from Dylan Thomas

Soderbergh tiptoes through the same Stanislaw Lem novel that Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky turned into a weighty cult epic 30 years ago. (All three versions have the same title.) It's about a planet named Solaris that functions not only like a giant brain, but also like a magical mind reader. As space station crew members study the planet, Solaris studies them. And, somehow, the planet's oceanic surface creates humanoid creatures from the astronauts' musings and memories.

Soderbergh focuses on the plight of Chris Kelvin, a psychotherapist analyzing the mission to Solaris, and casts a favorite actor, George Clooney, in the role. Clooney acts plausibly from one scene to the next. You sympathize with this handsome, sensible man confronting the inexplicable. Still, Clooney is not the best actor to embody layers of torment. Kelvin broods from the beginning - and grows more angst-ridden as he lands in space.

The first time Kelvin falls asleep on the space station, the spitting image of his dead wife Rheya (Natascha McElhone) crawls into bed with him. McElhone has a dark allure but also a spooky distance; she lacks the emotional translucence of Natalya Bondarchuk in the Soviet film. From the moment McElhone's Rheya appeared, I kept thinking of Nelson Algren's famous advice, "Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own." Especially in space. For what transpires is a replay of a doomsday marital scenario involving a psychologist and a woman he can't heal and love at the same time.

Solaris would be ludicrous if it weren't so determined to be dignified. But if you grew up reading serious science fiction instead of space operas, you might find its version of sci-fi concept art a geek form of comfort food. Viewers who will themselves onto Soderbergh's wavelength may enjoy the film. They'll see it as a peculiar restatement of the pivotal question first asked by Lem and Tarkovsky: When man explores the cosmos, is he seeking the unknown or merely looking for a mirror of himself? If the mirror is the case, the planet Solaris, stealing images from people's brains, commits the ultimate cosmic joke.

Soderbergh turns Kelvin's two spacemates into a couple of serious clowns. Jeremy Davies' fuzzy scientist Snow dithers through his uncertainties like Brad Dourif in his Cuckoo's Nest phase; he's caught in a state of terminal bemusement over the genesis and physical makeup of "visitors" like Kelvin's wife. (It's an affected, irritating acting turn.) Viola Davis, as Dr. Gordon, takes "the conquest of space" literally - any alien being that messes with her mind must be defeated, even if it generates humanoids that are potentially benign. Her disdain for Kelvin's emotionalism carries the air-clearing force of a good laugh. Davis gives the most potent performance.

True to the thinking-person's genre, these characters speak their minds incessantly, even if what they think is inexact. And the movie's narrative and visual design matches their heavy thoughts. The bookend framework ties the action into a conundrum; the austere blue-green colors and the circular set designs recall both Tarkovsky and Kubrick, sustaining a cerebral aura.

But even as geek comfort food, Soderbergh botches the recipe. He eschews both Tarkovsky's slow-building (169-minute) Slavic soulfulness and Lem's intricate topographies and histories of the planet Solaris. Instead, Soderbergh props up the story with a simultaneously gloomy and uplifting romanticism, borrowing Tarkovsky's cleansing rain and those Dylan Thomas lines, "Though lovers be lost love shall not;/And death shall have no dominion."

What's unfortunate is that the director has lost the amorous touch he possessed to his fingertips in Out of Sight. Soderbergh fills Rheya with so many psychological problems, and makes Kelvin so thoughtless or insensitive, you doubt that our hero could ever have been a competent shrink. If Nelson Algren had seen this movie, he'd probably have quipped, "Never marry a man called Doc." And there are more frivolous gaffes, such as Soderbergh's choice to showcase Clooney's naked butt throughout the couple's amorous scenes. Since a lot of their love-play transpires inside Kelvin's head, it makes you wonder whether he's a flagrant narcissist.

You shouldn't be considering that possibility. Soderbergh wants the film to be about an honest, flawed husband experiencing grief. But sadness accrues only in those lines from Dylan Thomas. Elsewhere, Solaris contains a mere abstraction of grief.

Solaris

Starring George Clooney and Natascha McElhone

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Released by 20th-Century Fox

Rated PG-13

Time 95 minutes