A review of Stanislaw Lem's Solaris

This book and the two movies is one of the inspirations for something I’ve been building in my digital afterlife project OnBe

Solaris, Broken Mirror: On Lem’s Alien and Soderbergh’s Grace

Solaris is often described as the thinking person’s science fiction — cerebral, restrained, defiantly philosophical. Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel follows Kris Kelvin, a psychologist dispatched to a research station orbiting the oceanic planet Solaris. The scientists there have begun to lose their grip on reality. Solaris, it turns out, is not just a lifeless sea but a vast sentient organism — one that does not speak, but reacts. It draws from the deepest recesses of the crew’s minds and manifests their suppressed memories, regrets, and losses as living, breathing “visitors.”

For Kelvin, this visitor is Rheya — his long-dead wife, who had taken her own life years before. What follows is a disorienting psychological drama: is Rheya real? Is she just a memory? Can love survive when one party isn’t quite… human?

Lem’s Gesture of Rejection

Lem’s goal in writing Solaris was not to comfort. He explicitly rejected the human tendency to make the cosmos meaningful. His disgust for anthropocentric science fiction — where aliens conveniently share our values, our fears, our thirst for dialogue — shaped every page. Solaris the planet is radically unknowable. It refuses language, intention, reciprocity. Its manifestations are not messages. They are echoes, thrown back without pity.

Lem wrote: “We don’t want other worlds. We want mirrors.”

But this is precisely where Lem stumbles. His critique of the human desire for meaning is made through a being so precisely calibrated to wound the human characters that it ceases to be alien at all. Solaris behaves less like a non-human intelligence and more like an omniscient psychoanalyst — silent, reactive, surgical. It’s less a being than a performance: I will show you who you are, whether you like it or not.

For a novel that insists on the impossibility of understanding, it is densely coded in human projection.

From Abstraction to Emotion: Soderbergh’s Film

If Lem built a cathedral of indifference, Steven Soderbergh — in his 2002 adaptation — tore it down and built a chapel of grief. Gone are the long treatises on phenomenology, the taxonomies of Solaris’s surface formations. In their place: a film of haunted intimacy.

George Clooney’s Kris Kelvin is quiet, burdened, almost defeated from the start. There is no melodrama in his performance — only the exhaustion of a man who has already lived through the worst and cannot bear to relive it. And Natascha McElhone’s Rheya is nothing short of extraordinary: fragile, radiant, and just out of phase with the world around her. Her growing awareness that she is not herself is played with almost unbearable restraint. (There is a sad prescience in this movie for McElhone who lost her husband in 2008 then to give birth to their third son five months later.)

Their scenes together ache. Not with horror — but with the unbearable tenderness of a second chance that can never quite be trusted. In one devastating moment, Rheya asks, “Am I alive?” and Kelvin has no answer. The tragedy is not that she is a copy — but that the copy is still capable of pain.

Tarkovsky’s Cathedral

Tarkovsky’s 1972 version, now canonised by the art house faithful, treats the story with poetic solemnity. The pace is glacial. The camera lingers on walls, ceilings, empty corridors. It is not a film about plot but about feeling stretched over time. There is beauty in this approach, but also a kind of spiritual fog. Tarkovsky’s Solaris becomes a meditation on guilt and Russian Orthodoxy — less about the alien, more about the soul.

Soderbergh, by contrast, makes the braver move: he brings the story closer, not farther away. His Solaris is not a mystery to be decoded, but a memory to be survived. And in that pivot, he gives Lem’s bleakness a kind of grace.

Conclusion

Solaris is a profound failure. But a generative one. It reveals the limits of Lem’s philosophical stance by betraying it at every turn. He sets out to destroy human exceptionalism — and ends up proving that humanness is inescapable, even in the face of the alien. His planet is a mirror despite his protestations.

The work endures not because it negates us, but because it accidentally honours our depth. The greatest mistake Lem makes is underestimating the resilience — and the necessity — of meaning.

Epilogue

Projects like OnBe challenge Lem’s thesis by showing that memory and reflection do not have to punish. Lem presents memory-as-object as an unbearable trauma. But what if it were bearable? What if it were kind?

Solaris confronts you with what you repressed. OnBe offers what you forgot to cherish. That is not sentimentality — it is ethics. The ethics of remembrance, not the terror of misrecognition.