Solaris (1972)

I may have spoiled myself a bit for this – I saw the 2002 remake from Steven Soderbergh, which starred George Clooney and focused a bit more on a love story hiding within Stanislaw Lem’s original novel. Andrei Tarkovsky’s original adaptation has more of a psychological mind-screw angle. Both are pretty faithful adaptations. Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) is a psychologist who’s sent to a space station orbiting Solaris, a strange planet with an all-encompassing ocean. The crew there started reporting awfully strange sights – like a four-meter-tall child walking on the water – and then started slacking off their duties and then falling silent. One of the more recent reports was a puzzling theory that the ocean itself may be sentient, and may be reading their thoughts (the pilot who saw the huge child visits Kelvin before his trip, and reports that the child looked like the son of a researcher who’d just died on Solaris). The station is a total mess when Kelvin arrives, with the staff…