Rating:

Starring George Clooney, Natascha McElhone, Jeremy Davies, Viola Davis and Ulrich Tukur

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Produced by James Cameron

Written by Stanislaw Lem

Screenplay by Steven Soderbergh

Distributed by 20th Century Fox

100 mins.

Rated PG-13

If you go to see director Steven Soderbergh’s (“Full Frontal”) sci-fi, drama/romance “Solaris,” the best you can hope for is an $8 nap. You can try to stay awake long enough to catch George Clooney (“Ocean’s Eleven”) enjoying Chinese food naked (just his butt) but I think even his die-hard fans will agree that it’s not worth the agony of watching the rest of the film.

“Solaris” is based on the best selling novel by Polish writer Stanislaw Lew and was first adapted to film in a 1972 Russian version.

Clooney plays Chris Kelvin, a psychiatrist living in a rainy city sometime in the future. He receives a cryptic video message from Gibarian (Ulrich Tukur), a friend who is living on a space station studying the planet Solaris. Gibarian begs Kelvin to come to Solaris to help with something unexplainable that is happening on the station.

When Kelvin arrives, it appears abandoned and there is a trail of blood leading to a room full of bagged, dead bodies. He finds a nearly incoherent inhabitant named Snow (Jeremy Davies, “Secretary”) who cannot explain the goings on, but says the dead crewmembers either committed suicide or died mysteriously. Oddly enough, there is only one other live person on the ship, but he refuses to come out of his room.Confused but determined to get to the bottom of things, Kelvin interviews the two surviving crew members, then heads off to bed. After falling asleep he has a vivid dream about how he first met his wife, Rheya, (Natascha McElhone, “Fear Dot Com”). He wakes up to find that she is in bed with him; the catch is that she’s been dead for months.

I was actually excited to see this film. I like George Clooney and since one reviewer claimed the film was a “mind-bender,” I was all ready to get my thinking cap on. Initially the story seems intriguing, but ultimately it gets old.

One of the biggest problems is the pace, which is unbearably slow, combine that with the annoying music, which sounds like a 15-second electric keyboard setting played over and over again, and then it’s nap time.

Then there are the “special effects.” The space station and shuttle look like they belong in a low-budget film, and the planet’s surface, which we are shown every few minutes, looks like a new age computer screen saver.

The acting is “Solaris'” only saving grace. Overall, the cast does a really good job with the script. The only complaint is that they talk in hushed, whispery voices that made it all the harder to keep my eyes open.Most annoying about Solaris is how seriously it takes itself. It wants to be a complicated film that makes you agonize over what is really going on, but there’s no mystery to debate over because the characters let you know everything you might not be able to figure out on your own. The movie somehow even manages a Hollywood ending.

At one point Kelvin’s dead friend Gibarian comes to him in a dream and tells him not to try to figure anything out because there’s no solution. Yeah, and no point in ever seeing this movie.