Word: kelvin
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...Tarkovsky refuses to lay this great symbolic egg and then just leave it there as nothing but a symbolic egg. He embellishes the metaphor with many more illusions and ideas, emotions and moments of suspense, dabbed subtly here, dropped subtly there for contemplation. Thus Kelvin must not only reconcile himself to the idea of dreams incarnate, but to a materialized, breathing, caressing version of his former wife, who had committed suicide on Earth. He becomes sucked in by his desire to love this bionic apparition, neutrinos or no. Stanley Kubrick may have meant to convey this same space-subconscious analogy...
...Kelvin is a cool customer. Back on Earth, we've already seen him alienate his anxious father with freezing scowls. When a worried former Solaris astronaut tries to warn him about his haunting visions, like hallucinations come to life, Kelvin mocks, scoffs and deries him out of the house. You cloud real science with your romanticism, he snaps. No such nonsense for Kelvin...
...misery, though, and he wasn't the type. And why does Sartorius, one of the two remaining scientists, have a dwarf running out of his room? Why the ball?, and why the young girl who mysteriously prowls the space lab in a blue negligee? "Is she real?," Kelvin asks Snauf, the last astronaut. "Is she human?" Snauf only laughs, wildly, wickedly. A panic starts to grab Kelvin, like a pounding hangover on a clammy summer morning. No more Mr. Imperterbable. On a tape made just before his suicide, Gibaryan tells Kelvin nervously not to think that these "guests"--the apparitions...
...SNAUF, still wild-eyed and now drunk, sums up the meaning of this bizarre mission in another way. "We must strive after something we fear and which we do not ask for," he tells Kelvin. "Man needs man." Here is the key. Solaris has not been dealing with space travel at all, but with man's emprisonment inside his own conscience, his own memories, his ties to the past. The ocean Solaris, Kelvin begins to understand, draws men's dreams from their subconscious during the night and makes them materialize, not in flesh and blood but in "neutrinos," an indestructible...
...look balding and brooding, like cafe intellectuals. (They even wear leather jackets over their space suits.) Sartorius wants to cut up Hari in the interest of science. "Immortality," he cries. "Faust's dream!" Snauf copes by letting himself slip into sarcastic lunacy; when Hari jerks back to life in Kelvin's arms, he mutters "I can't stand all these resurrections." And the once zero-degree Kelvin gives himself over to his soulful-eyed dream woman like the agnostic who embraces religion, because only thus can he bear the pain of living...