In the new Steven Soderbergh movie, where the planet Solaris stands in for our interior dreams and wishes, what sticks are the rich, fruity colors of Solaris itself. The planet is most often seen in a screen-filling closeup, particularly near the end of the film, when our vantage point tracks slowly inward, as though through the act of viewing we ourselves have been seduced by the thought of what lies beneath those cotton-candy clouds. During the final reel, when Kris Kelvin (George Clooney) makes a decision that, come what may, he'd rather meet certain death in the skies over Solaris rather than face the rest of his life alone on planet earth, it appears as a bridge between shots. It's as if the planet itself is influencing Kelvin's decisions, insinuating itself into his loneliness and offering one last chance for companionship. Or it may be that the image of the planet is a representation of consciousness itself - the inside of Kelvin's mind, synapses firing and creating a simulacrum of a lost lover. Perhaps it represents God Himself - the gateway to heaven, where you dwell forever in the presence of representations of your earthly happiness.

Certainly the seductive, Technicolor imagery of Solaris 2002 is a far cry from the sterile, Kubrick-influenced surroundings of the minimalist Andrei Tarkovsky film it remakes. Who knows what Tarkovsky might have done with the resources of a 20th Century Fox behind him? If the chilliness of the planet in Tarkovsky's film - monochromatic, with wisps of clouds creating a Russian mysterioso effect above a planet that seems to be made entirely of ocean - is any indication, he wouldn't have opted for the fully saturated, flat-out gorgeous effect that Soderbergh goes for. Soderbergh's Solaris may actually be one manifestation of a Hollywood version of the afterlife. In its mind-boggling sci-fi beauty, it's closer to the heavenly apparitions of Douglas Trumbull's Brainstorm than it is to Tarkovsky's source material.

Mood-wise, Soderbergh's Solaris is dissimilar to, but clearly inspired by, Tarkovsky's. The uniformly chilly reception it received from audiences is disheartening - there was a time when mainstream American movies were adventurous enough that Solaris wouldn't seem like such an anomaly. It is slow for a Hollywood film, but Soderbergh jettisons almost completely the exceedingly languid material that made up the first half of the original. What's left is a simple allegorical tale about the ghosts that haunt the inside of a man's mind, and the respite he seeks from his conscience. If George Clooney gives the best performance of his career here, he is probably still too facile for the material, his good looks and now instinctive charisma rubbing against the grain of an emotionally devastated character. I suppose what he projects here is the idea of emptiness, the image of a handsome but empty shell of a man who was once utterly satisfied with the world around him.

Soderbergh shoots the film with a grace and sensitivity that I frankly wouldn't have expected, given that his films often seem to me to operate at a hip, ironic remove from their subjects. This distance I attribute partly to Soderbergh's fondness of jazzy editing devices, of superimposing sound from one shot over the action of another, or using a baffling array of camera tricks to drench his images in color or saturate them with film grain. I've always found his work to be distractingly stylized, but Solaris is downright meditative and, occasionally, very affecting.

Specifically, Solaris contains at least one scene of crushing emotional power. In it, Kelvin does something that's generally beyond the abilities of a SF protagonist - he reacts to a science-fiction scenario decisively, his actions based on his intellect, rather than standing slack-jawed and gaping. His actions represent such a rigid denial of emotion, a disciplined response to an impossible situation, that they're almost shocking. The plaintive look on the face of his wife - or, rather, a simulacrum of his wife, as she pleads for mercy through an airlock window, is haunting and terrifying.

As Kelvin's dead wife, who is seen in flashbacks, and as the representation of that woman that Solaris creates from Kelvin's memories of her, Natasha McElhone is terrifically spooky. I don't think she's been photographed in quite this way before. Soderbergh underscores her sexiness, which comes intertwined with her character's intellect, but he really makes something of her big, all-knowing eyes, which appear here almost as troubling as those of a Keane child. Looking into those eyes, sad but stoic, here feels, somehow, like looking into the cosmos itself.

Good stuff for science fiction., and Solaris is a pretty terrific science fiction movie, with wonderful special effects, a stand-out score, and rich but unobtrusive cinematography. There are flaws, of course. In the most egregious example of miscalculation, Jeremy Davies plays a refugee from a hip indie film who remains irritating in his affectations even after his unpleasant demeanor is explained. (After I saw Solaris, it started to seem that Davies appeared in every movie ever made, or at least all of them that I came across while channel surfing, and just the sight of him made me cringe a little.) The ending, in which one of the characters mouths something hollow and programmatic to the other one about forgiveness, at first feels a little cheap and unearned. And yet, upon further reflection, more possibilities seem to spin out of the sequence. What is the real nature of happpiness? What is the difference between a human being and a manufactured replica of same, one that is created using the consciousness of the original? If a lover spares us knowledge of the truth underlying our existence, can we live the rest of eternity in blissful ignorance? Finally, Solaris may be a meaty Christian allegory from an avowed atheist. It's that contradiction, among others, that lends it a rich ambiguity that places it among the most rewarding films of the year.