Journey into space

Steven Soderbergh's Solaris crash-landed at the US boxoffice. Given an inappropriate blanket release, with ads that made it look like Galaxy Quest, plus "gorgeous George Clooney" (as it's de rigueur to bill him now), the American public could be pardoned for bringing the wrong sci-fi expectations to the film - for the first weekend, anyhow.

It's actually a rare American attempt at European art-house cinema, inspired by Tarkovsky's three-hour 1972 Russian adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's novel, a meditation about inner space rather than an adventure in outer space.

Clooney plays Chris Kelvin, a widower astronaut sent to discover why another space ship has ceased sending signals from the sour-looking planet Solaris. On target, he boards a mysteriously stricken vessel. Falling asleep, he awakes with a woman (Natascha McElhone) beside him who resembles his late wife, Rheya.

Is she real, or a spectral memory? Is he ready to cut his earthly ties and live with this wifely replicant? And will their metaphysical remarriage be any more fun than the terrestrial disaster we see in flashback?

This is basically the sort of sentimental, old-fashioned plot popular on stage and in novels after the First World War to comfort the living for the loss of loved ones.

JM Barrie's own sci-fi story, Mary Rose, about a girl who vanishes for decades, then turns up still fresh and young as an overnight daisy, is also about getting a "second chance" in life. Tarkovsky's film made rather more of national melancholia and love of Mother Russia than it did of grieving over dead wives: understandable, as its troublesome director was about to be ordered to choose between self-exile or the Gulag.

Soderbergh shrinks the Russian epic's metaphysical volume into a snug American hope that Kelvin and Rheya will learn from their past mistakes and make a go of it the second time round.

It's banal and heavy going; and you won't care either way. Compensation lies in the sombre, velvety photography - by the director himself, working under the name of "Peter Andrews" - and the production design.

Like Ridley Scott, Soderbergh has a talent for textures and elegant Alienlike compositions. I guess Ocean's Eleven will more than pay for this self-indulgence: so no tears.

Solaris
Cert: 12A