The plot centers on a space station orbiting the fictional planet Solaris, where a scientific mission has stalled because the skeleton crew of three scientists have fallen into emotional crises.

Solaris won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Palme d'Or.

[8] Psychologist Kris Kelvin is about to be sent on an interstellar journey to evaluate whether a decades-old space station, positioned over the oceanic planet Solaris, should continue to study it.

Years earlier, Burton had been part of an exploratory team at Solaris but was recalled when he described strange happenings, including seeing a four-meter-tall child on the surface of the water on the planet.

A panel of scientists and military personnel dismissed these visions as hallucinations, but now that the remaining crew members are making similarly strange reports, Kelvin's skills are needed.

After leaving the house, Burton tells Kelvin that he recognized the child's face as that of one who was orphaned due to the disappearance of one of the Solaris explorers.

He finds that Gibarian left him a rambling, cryptic farewell video message, warning him about the strange things happening at the station.

Snaut explains that the "visitors" or "guests" began appearing after the scientists conducted radiation experiments, directing X-rays at the swirling surface of the planet in a desperate attempt to understand its nature.

Later, Snaut proposes beaming Kelvin's brainwave patterns at Solaris in hopes that it will understand them and stop the disturbing apparitions.

[10] Another inspiration was Tarkovsky's desire to bring emotional depth to the science fiction genre, which he regarded as shallow due to its attention to technological invention; in a 1970 interview, he singled out Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey as "phoney on many points" and "a lifeless schema with only pretensions to truth".

The final screenplay yielded the shooting script, which has less action on Earth and deletes Kelvin's marriage to his second wife, Maria, from the story.

In the movie, Tarkovsky concentrates on Kelvin's feelings for his wife, Hari, and the impact of outer space exploration on the human condition.

Dr. Gibarian's monologue (from the novel's sixth chapter) is the highlight of the final library scene, wherein Snaut says: "We don't need other worlds.

[15] Tarkovsky initially wanted his ex-wife, Irma Raush, to play Hari, but after meeting actress Bibi Andersson in June 1970, he decided that she was better for the role.

[17] After filming was almost completed, Tarkovsky rated actors and performances thus: Bondarchuk, Järvet, Solonitsyn, Banionis, Dvorzhetsky, and Grinko; he also wrote in his diary that "Natalya B. has outshone everybody".

[18] In the summer of 1970 the State Committee for Cinematography (Goskino SSSR) authorized the production of Solaris, with a length of 4,000 metres (13,123 ft), equivalent to a two-hour-twenty-minute running time.

The designer and director consulted with scientist and aerospace engineer Lupichev, who lent them a 1960s-era mainframe computer for set decoration.

[24] The soundtrack of Solaris features Johann Sebastian Bach's chorale prelude for organ Ich ruf' zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, BWV 639, played by Leonid Roizman [ru], and an electronic score by Eduard Artemyev.

[13] Solaris premiered at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury and was nominated for the Palme d'Or.

[26] Unlike the vast majority of commercial and ideological films in the 1970s, Solaris screened in the USSR in limited run for 15 years.

Upon exhibition in the United States, the film, truncated by 30 minutes, premiered at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York City on October 6, 1976.

[28] Film critic Roger Ebert reviewed the 1976 release for The Chicago Sun-Times, giving three out of four stars and writing, "Solaris isn't a fast-moving action picture; it's a thoughtful, deep, sensitive movie that uses the freedom of science fiction to examine human nature.

'[29] Ebert added Solaris to his "Great Movies" list in 2003, saying he had initially "balked" at its length and pacing but later came to admire Tarkovsky's goals.

The consensus states: "Solaris is a haunting, meditative film that uses sci-fi to raise complex questions about humanity and existence.

[36] Salman Rushdie has called Solaris "a sci-fi masterpiece", adding, "This exploration of the unreliability of reality and the power of the human unconscious, this great examination of the limits of rationalism and the perverse power of even the most ill-fated love, needs to be seen as widely as possible before it's transformed by Steven Soderbergh and James Cameron into what they ludicrously threaten will be 2001 meets Last Tango in Paris.

"[37] In her 1997 article "Identifying Fears", M. Galina called Solaris "one of the biggest events in Soviet science fiction cinema" and one of few that do not now seem anachronistic.

[48] In the autobiographical documentary Voyage in Time (1983), Tarkovsky says he viewed Solaris as an artistic failure because it did not transcend genre as he believed his film Stalker (1979) did, due to the required technological dialogue and special effects.

[49] In an example of life imitating art, Bondarchuk revealed in a 2010 interview that she fell in love with Tarkovsky while filming Solaris and, after their relationship ended, became suicidal.

[7][52] The most noticeable difference from the previous 2002 Criterion DVD release[53] was that the blue and white tinted monochrome scenes from the film were restored.