Starring: George Clooney, Natascha McElhone, and Jeremy Davies
Directed by: Stephen Soderbergh
SYNOPSIS:
When something goes wrong aboard the Prometheus, a spaceship orbiting the titular planet, astronaut-psychologist Chris Kelvin (Clooney) investigates, discovering that one crew member has killed himself, and two others (Davies and Ulrich Tukur) are haunted by lifelike visions. Soon Kelvin starts seeing visions, too-in the form of his wife (McElhone), who committed suicide years before-and he must choose between saving Earth from a potentially evil alien force and having a second chance at a lost love. "This is by far the hardest acting job I've ever had to do," says Clooney, who petitioned producing partner Soderbergh for the role after Daniel Day-Lewis turned it down. "Every single scene is like, 'Okay, this scene may be the last moment of your life.' " In 1972, Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky converted Stanislaw Lem's sci-fi novel into a nearly three-hour tract on Communism and inhumanity ("not his best film," cautions Clooney); now Soderbergh refashions the material into a kind of psychosexual search for God. Or, as the director himself has said, " a combination of 2001 and Last Tango in Paris."

Coy George: "It's [not an easy] thing to do when you're 41," Clooney says of his first nude scene. "I not only had to clear the entire set, I had to clear the director out."