Factual error: The fake Rheya tries to kill herself by drinking liquid oxygen. The liquid shown is green, viscous, and foaming and looks a bit like the monster's body fluid in Alien. Liquid oxygen is colorless, non-viscous and doesn't produce sticky bubbles. (01:00:25)
Solaris (2002)
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Directed by: Steven Soderbergh
Starring: George Clooney, Viola Davis, Natascha McElhone, Jeremy Davies, Ulrich Tukur
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Solaris is a psychological Science Fiction film that explores existence, guilt, life, death, resurrection and how woefully unprepared humankind might be for alien contact. George Clooney plays a psychiatrist astronaut sent to find out what happened to a space station that is studying a world it orbits around. He discovers what's left of the crew after what appears to be strange murders and suicides. What follows is a painfully slow-moving tale where dreams mesh with memories and re-created individuals, including what appears to be the psychiatrist's dead wife, played by Natascha McElhone. Haunted by the circumstances surrounding their tumultuous relationship and her death, and struggling to comprehend what's happened and happening on the space station, the psychiatrist slowly spirals toward the planet psychologically and physically. Not for everyone, and actually not a space romance, it's more like big concept Science Fiction such as Contact or Arrival with disintegrating relationships and a opportunity at a second chance.
More mistakes in Solaris
Chris Kelvin: What does Solaris want from us?
Gibarian: Why do you think it has to want something? This is why you have to leave. If you keep thinking there's a solution, you'll die here.
Chris Kelvin: I can't leave her. I'll figure it out.
Gibarian: Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you? There are no answers, only choices.
Trivia: The original 1961 story by Polish sci-fi writer Stanisław Lem was about the utter futility of attempted communications between humans and intelligent extraterrestrial species, because humans and aliens would have no common physical or psychological frame of reference for any attempted communication. For example, in the book, human scientists study the ocean planet Solaris for many decades without ever deciphering what they think are intelligent, changing patterns on the planet's fluid surface. They attempt to provoke a response from Solaris by firing X-rays at the planet, and the planet responds by reaching into the minds of the scientists and creating physical manifestations of their most guilty and painful memories. This has a traumatic effect on the baffled scientists, of course, and they have no idea what kind of communication they have established. Ultimately, the human scientists realise that the intelligence of Solaris is so vastly different from human intelligence, no meaningful interspecies communication is possible. This is a common theme in other works by Stanislaw Lem.
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