Another remake no one asked for: SOLARIS (2002)

[zacharythax]

WARNING: In case you actually give a fug, this review contains spoilers, not that it matters.

The review of the original in the Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film goes like this: "Better than 2001." If I were to make a one-sentence entry on this remake my first impulse would be "More soporific than They Saved Hitler's Brain." Like the remake of Planet of the Apes they squandered the opportunity to make a version really faithful to the book--but that would have been waaaaaay over most people's heads. Instead they boiled it down to the whole doomed romance angle. 

Admittedly, the special effects are better, the guy's dead wife is hotter (she looks like Jane Seymour, but we never get to see her naked. They DO chose to show George Clooney's buttcrack, which I could have done without, but whatever) 

Psychiatrist Chris Kelvin (Clooney) gets talked into going up to the space station orbiting a sentient planet. Once up there he finds blood on the wall, a mysterious little kid running round and Jermey Davies, acting no different than he does as Dickie Bennett on Justified. He's spaced out, twitchy and seems like he's been on meth a LONG time. George falls asleep, dreams about his dead wife, wakes up and she's there. Knowing that she's just a creation of the intelligent planet from his mind (just like a million Star Trek plots) he sticks her in the airlock and blasts her out into space. The next night he dreams about her and she comes back.

This time she figures out who and what she is and, facing an existential crisis drinks liquid oxygen. She wakes up, though and demands that the ship's physicist shoot her with a disintegrator gun. She gives a very bland goodbye message on the video, then Kelvin finds blood on the ceiling and moves a grate to find Dickie Bennett's corpse. It turns out the guy they've been talking to the whole movie long is an alien replicant. He advises them to haul ass because the raygun has increased the gravitational field of the planet [it shoots ANTI-Higg's bosons--you'd think it'd make the planet lighter (!?)]

They take off and we see Clooney back on earth. He cuts himself and it heals instantly. Then there's a flashback to the takeoff from the space station. The REAL Chris Kelvin got left behind and the one we're seeing cutting up the zuccini in his kitchen is a copy. The dead wife appears again and it ends happily.

Don't miss the original! Don't bother with this one...unless you have severe insomnia.