RE: Solaris.
I came to the book first, then the films in order. I was quite excited by the news of the remake and enjoyed it very much. It shifts away from the source material exactly as the article linked to mentions but works well for that. What both films show (to me) is how to make a decent film from a book: Take what you liked from the book and what excited you and use that to inspire an adaption into a new medium rather than slavishly trying to replicate the book.
I can appreciate that Soderbergh’s film is not to every one's taste but boring? It is slow and thoughtful but not ponderous. I appreciate that it might lack laser beams and space battles but none the less is a powerful work. Where the Tarkovsky stuck to the themes in the book surrounding the God like nature of Solaris (or perhaps more correctly the Clarkian theme of advanced technology/ability being construed as magic) Soderbergh focuses more on the effect rather than the cause of the manifestations and in that reexamines the source material for which I, for one, am grateful.
EDIT:Actually I had another thought about this prompted by the death of my wife's Aunt. I'm unable to make the funeral due to childcare issues, and will at some point need to make an appropriate gesture to her husband. My wife's family are all Church of Scotland and I'm an atheist. The point of the back story is that we need to tell our children something and the family line will be that she has gone to heaven, where as for me she lives on in our memory of her and in a very real sense (for me) exists there. Ten years on and I still have converstations with my Dad, particularly since my two girls came along.
So for me Solaris examines this dichotomy. Is the dead wife/child/brother alive, a memory or have the astronauts (Cosmonauts?) found heaven? No resolution is presented in any version in print of film, iirc, but it allows us to meditate on these questions. So if the point of art is to question, reflect and entertain then Solaris works on these levels and I would argue is therefore not boring.