Now, I’m not calling Solaris a classic, but it certainly deserves a little more respect, or at least some patience. Unlike so many movies, this is one that does not pander to an audience or pad its running time with lavish special effects and stunts. Yes old lady who sat next to me, this is a science fiction picture, but it is surprisingly quiet and moody. Most of the real technical stuff is in the background; we never, for example, learn the year or the location of the planet Solaris, or anything like that. Solaris is about emotions not technical jargon.

George Clooney, in another strong performance, stars as Chris Kelvin, a psychiatrist who is sent to investigate strange happenings on a space station orbiting the planet Solaris. When he arrives (and after he pays homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey), he finds only two crew members alive: Snow (Jeremy Davies) and Gordon (Viola Davis). Before he can fully understand what has happened on Solaris, Chris is visited by his wife Rhea (Natasha McElhone). It is strange that she appears on the space station far from earth, and even stranger since she died years ago.

I will not reveal why or how Rhea has appeared. Still, the plot is largely irrelevant to Solaris, as director and screenwriter Steven Soderbergh is more interested with ideas like regret and guilt than in conventions like conflict or action. Soderbergh, who has also released Ocean's Eleven and Full Frontal in the last twelve months, proves that he is one of our most daring directors, moving from crime to experimental video to austere science fiction. Love or hate his films, you have to admire his variety, and also his ability to get films he wants made onto the screen. Solaris is difficult and strange, and if did not have his name on it (along with that of producer James Cameron), I doubt we’d ever see it in this form in multiplexes around the country.

Still, I am not ready to call Solaris a good film. First, I’d like to see if a few more times just to really wrap my brain around the thing, and even then I believe I’d still have some problems with it. While I admire Soderbergh’s choice of topics, there are other films that have dealt with obsessive guilt in smarter and more compelling ways (Most significantly, Hitchcock’s Vertigo). Primary amongst Solaris’ problems is that its excess of style seems to get in the way of fully understanding and appreciating its focal love story. We glimpse at Chris and Rhea’s life together, but not enough, and never in a way that surpasses generic overly-cutsey couples stuff. I was far more moved by the love story in the recent Punch-Drunk Love. Clooney lets his emotions simmer beneath the surface and then boil over in well-placed bursts of rage, but for all the show I felt surprisingly distant.