Science fiction is called an "idea-driven" genre, but the ideas driving it are often the sterile reductionisms of popular science or (in film) the pious sentimentalities of Steven Spielberg. Stanislaw Lem is different. In the best of his novels and short stories—the Swiftian Star Diaries (1971); the "Fables for Robots" collected in Mortal Engines (1981); the late works, in which a lengthening shadow of pessimism covers his earlier setpieces and characters—the Polish writer plays ideas as though they were musical instruments, again and again inventing impossibilities that amuse and astound us both by their plausibility—their quality of sounding like real science—and by their tall-tale ridiculousness. Like Borges, he is a magician, and comedian, of the theoretical. To read the best parts of the Star Diaries is to experience one of art's greater pleasures—that of being in the hand of a genius who can seemingly do anything.

Thus the boring part of most sci-fi stories—the pseudo-science—is the best part of Lem's. No one really enjoys reading about the mechanics of "onboard anti-grav machines," but readers of Lem's most popular novel, Solaris (1961), often cite the chapter-length history of "Solaristics" as a highlight of Lem's oeuvre. None of the contents of that chapter appear in Steven Soderbergh's recent film version of Solaris, a fact that highlights the difficulties awaiting any filmmaker who would seek to adapt a writer as cerebral as Lem. That Soderbergh, like the great Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky before him, manages to parlay all this Lemmish theorizing into a reasonably compelling film testifies both to his skills and to the basic power of the story Lem developed.

That story, in a nutshell, runs like this: at the edge of known space sits the mysterious planet Solaris, which may be a giant brain, or may be something even more incomprehensible to us. What we do know is that the astronauts sent to investigate it aren't returning our phone calls. In response to an urgent video message from one such astronaut, psychiatrist Chris Kelvin (played in the movie by George Clooney) departs for the Solaris-orbiting space station Prometheus, only to find the station deserted, his friend, Dr. Gibarian, dead, and the other crew (Gordon, played by Viola Davis, and Snow, played by Jeremy Davies) insane. Gordon won't leave her room, though she recites Kelvin a long list of self-diagnosed psychiatric disorders from behind the door, while Snow looks and talks like a gentle Charles Manson, dismissing Kelvin's questions with Zen koans: "I could tell you what's happening here, but I don't know if that would really tell you what's happening here." Kelvin, somewhat huffy and not a little spooked, decides to take a nap. He awakens to the touch of his dead wife Rheya's hand.

These "visitors," as Dr. Snow calls them, are not human—the planet itself creates them from a combination of neutrinos and the crew members' memories—but they feel and act like humans. Kelvin at first backs away from this version of Rheya (Natascha McElhone) and from the dilemmas she poses, sending her off in an escape pod; when the planet, whether for inscrutable reasons of its own or by a random natural process, sends another, he tries, against all logic, to rebuild his marriage. ("Wonder if they can get pregnant," sneers Snow.) But Neo-Rheya paradoxically grows in independence the longer she stays near Kelvin, feeding off his memories. She eventually becomes aware that she's a simulacrum, and hates what she is.

Agonizingly serious philosophical issues obviously pervade a story like this. What do you do with the doubles? They're not human, but if you prick them, do they not bleed? Behind this theme is the larger one of human knowledge itself, which Lem tragicomically emphasizes in the novel Solaris as he does in Fiasco (1987) and in some of the later Star Diaries. Can humanity, Lem asks, truly see anything "out there" besides its own shadow? In his 1972 film of Solaris, which he intended as a rebuke to the Kubrickian coldness of 2001 (1968), Tarkovsky softened Lem's question: can or should humans attempt to penetrate the mystery of space when as great a mystery lies inside them? Soderbergh has attempted to chart a middle course between Tarkovsky's weighty mysticism and Lem's mordant skepticism, focusing on the love story between Kelvin and pseudo-Rheya. His additions and changes to the source material reflect this humanist emphasis.

For starters, he invents a backstory in which Rheya, a mercurial writer, commits suicide after Kelvin rejects her for aborting his child. In contrast to Lem, who uses characters as "epistemological probes" (Annie Dillard's phrase) to the near-exclusion of personality—one suspects Lem couldn't care less why Rheya killed herself—Soderbergh chivalrously tries to give the character some dimension, rather than using her as a stick to hang questions on. Natascha McEllhone—whose eyes alone suggest wild, ambiguous depths—helps tremendously in this regard. Still, most of the Earthbound flashbacks of Kelvin and Rheya remain stubbornly that. As in Soderbergh's Traffic, what we get is gloriously shot melodrama, makeshift depth—not actively bad, but not fully satisfying, especially once we get over the coolness of the camera angles. The same goes for McEllhone and Clooney's chemistry once aboard ship. Eventually all those shots of rainy windowpanes and moist eyes begin to feel like cheating, as if Soderbergh desperately wants to suggest powerful emotion without dramatizing it.

More convincingly, Soderbergh tinkers with the onboard crew of the space station. He makes Dr. Gordon an African American woman rather than (as in earlier versions) your classic ultra-male white-haired sci-fi doctor. Since Gordon's role in the story is to speak up for "reason"—that is, for abandoning the "visitors," leaving Solaris, retreating to a place where human reason still works—her pleas have more emotional heft coming from somebody who doesn't conform to the genre's conventions for the Voice of Science. That Viola Davis perfectly conveys the struggle of a rational person to ignore her own senses completes the effect, making Gordon what he wasn't in the novel or the earlier film; an interesting character. Some critics, meanwhile, have found Jeremy Davies' performance as Snow a little too antic, but he made me laugh, which is nice when you're confronting ethical dilemmas in deep space. Soderbergh also adds a memorably creepy twist to the side-story of Snow's double—a moment that exploits all the Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style uncanniness implicit in the very idea of the "visitors," who are human, yet not.

All these additions, I think, are meant to humanize Solaris—to make of it both a love story and a drama about people confronting ethical choices, as opposed to Lem's focus on the folly of human reason. Soderbergh's most visible gesture in this direction is the casting of George Clooney, a rakish Everyguy, in the lead role. Clooney succeeds as Kelvin to the extent that Kelvin has been positioned as an objective, unemotional observer—one of the more successful flashback scenes between Kelvin and Rheya is one in which Kelvin, at a dinner party, asserts that of course "God" is merely a human construct, while the more Romantic Rheya suffers mutely. What Clooney can't do, even for a second, is match the splendid, harrassed gravity that Donatas Banionis brought to the role in Tarkovsky's version.

Lem's novel ends with a scene of final desolation and absurd hope: Kelvin touches down on Solaris to wait, in despair, for Rheya, wondering if "the time of cruel miracles" is past. Tarkovsky's version, that most Russian Orthodox of sci-fi films, ends with Kelvin on Solaris, kneeling this time before the front step of his parents' home, leaving the viewer to wonder: has he been granted salvation, in the form of an opportunity to penetrate the mystery of himself, or is he trapped in a solipsistic hell? Since Solaris poses too many questions to resolve, and since such stories seem to demand a slightly different ending every time they're told, Soderbergh's ending departs from both of his sources. He straightforwardly incorporates the story's ambiguity into its form, giving us a double ending in which Clooney takes, or doesn't take, an escape pod back to Earth, and stays, or doesn't stay, on Solaris. This is a fine ending for a decent film—even a bit humble, as if Soderbergh knows his limits. Not a mystic like Tarkovsky or a philosopher like Lem, he will not try to take us to the planet; he will pull back at the last minute. He knows he's skillful enough to tell the human part of the story; he won't try to show us God as well.

And what, after all, of God? Lem's novel tilts toward utter skepticism; he seems to believe that if there are intelligences out there greater than ours, we cannot understand them for precisely that reason, and attempts at contact are futile. For all his humor, he's a hardheaded scientific materialist. So why does Solaris also feature conversations between Snow and Kelvin about the existence of God? Why does The Investigation (1961), Lem's mystery novel about reanimated corpses, feel like a lost cousin to G.K. Chesterton's theistic thriller The Man Who Was Thursday? Perhaps for the same reason that, though I find such alien-contact films as Close Encounters or E.T. more successful in their treatment of human interaction—more fun to watch—I'm almost happier that Soderbergh's Solaris got made. Soderbergh has given us a pretty good film in which mystery is glimpsed without being explained away or sentimentalized. And that's news.

Phil Christman, a 2001 Calvin College graduate, writes and substitute teaches in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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