Sphere

When I saw the preview for Sphere over and over again, I should've known that something bad was up. The preview had no tension in it at all! At the end, I wanted to shout "Gimmmie an S!" and so on. Undaunted by my doubting self I went to see the movie anyway. I think I should've stayed home and reread the book. The film lacked any tension that being several thousand feet below the Pacific should provide. The title cards placed in the film threw it off balance. It reminded me of "Frasier," but on that show, they work! Dustin Hoffman and Samuel L. Jackson were game enough to go along with this soggy mess, and Sharon Stone hasn't made a decent movie since Casino. The usually talented Barry Levinson was out of his element here. The film should've been handled by someone who knew the intricacies of working in a wet for wet environment. Maybe someone like, James Cameron? He would've been a fine choice, but he was too busy making a ship sink. If you want a good underwater adventure from Michael Crichton, read the book.

Most times when a novel is made into a film, you can follow the story without having to read the book. Sphere has a very strange and complex story. If you haven't read the book first, the movie will be hard to follow.

The movie follows the book pretty closely. Barry Levinson directs his 2nd Crichton adaptation, following Disclosure. There is a terrific superstar cast. Dustin Hoffman is a legend and has made several great movies with Levinson. Samuel L. Jackson, always fun to watch, is one of the top actors of today. The sexy Sharon Stone here continues to prove how good of an actress she is.

Sphere is a very strange, but entertaining movie. I do reccomend reading the book beforehand, though.

I need to start off by saying Sphere ranks as one of my top favorites among Michael Crichton's novels.

As a kid, I vaguely remembered glimpsing Sphere (1998), but for some reason I hadn't (re)watched it until now. I'm convinced that if I had watched the whole thing back then, I'd felt far more nostalgia for it.

The book laid out a quasi 'foolproof' formula for a hit movie: gather a small group of intellectuels, isolate 'em from the outside world, add some mystery and the unknown, and voilá! Sound familiar? Despite this, the filmmakers couldn't quite crack the code for this one.

While the first act showed some promise, later acts felt rushed and ultimately fell apart, failing to capture the impact of the book, especially the end. Perhaps those story changes were as helpful as a screen door on a submarine.

Regarding the casting: Hoffman was a great choice for Norman, and Schreiber was fine as Ted. Well, Jackson is like the 'wildcard' of actors, he can work with anyone and anything, so that's that.

However, whenever Stone was on screen, I couldn't help but wonder who could portray Beth instead of her. In my mind, I envisioned actress like Amy Brenneman from Heat, or rather Kim Dickens from Mercury Rising, or even Radha Mitchell from Pitch Black --someone with a bit of edge, yet still lively and likable. Unlike Stone, who seemed devious from the get-go. While she really excelled in Basic Instinct with such mannerisms, here she seemed miscast.

Visually, some aspects still hold up. Though initially disappointed by certain missing elements, maybe it's for the best.

As for recommendations, it's probably a once-in-a-lifetime watch (even as a devoted Crichton fan, once in total is enough for now).

I rate it a weak 6/10.

PS: I'd recommend opting for the book instead, or for the audiobook (with a sample by Scott Brick, sounds nice).

When the military discover what they believe to be a spaceship at the bottom of the ocean they bring in Dr Norman Goodman who had once written a report on the protocol for an alien encounter. His report had named a team of experts – this team is also assembled. The team descend to the craft and begin to find some astonishing things about the craft. However when they find a huge golden sphere they begin to experience problems. Problems that become worse when a storm traps them at the bottom of the ocean.

With a cast like this – you gotta have high hopes. With a director and a writer to match you deserve something fantastic! And for the most part this delivers. The build up is dark, mysterious and exciting. However once the sphere is found it goes downhill. It still has some really good moments – the jellyfish bit is scary and other actions bits are cool. But it gets all muddled up in what the sphere is and who is doing what on the base. It almost manages to hold together until the final half hour then it all just collapses like a flan in a cupboard! It's a shame because for the most part it felt like it was building to something much better, but no.

The cast promised much but didn't deliver. Jackson was great, but I don't think he can be bad – even in a bad movie. Hoffman stutters around like he doesn't know what he's doing. I know he's meant to be playing a character that isn't used to heroics, but he doesn't bring anything. Stone is OK but at times looks like she reading her lines off a board. Coyote is OK and Schreiber is understated by his own hammy standards. It's also cool to see Queen Latifah in a role.

Overall this is worth watching as for the majority it's real good. However you notice that the film has got 30 minutes left to go – make your excuses and leave, by then you've seen the best it has to offer.

The Sphere (1998)

Barry Levinson is one of those directors who has no interest in art, or in invention, or in pretension, either. And so his films sometimes hit a popular strain that makes them take off. He has some terrible misfires, for sure, but his best films ("Rain Man," "Sleepers") have people who you relate to, and who have to confront something extraordinary.

That was the idea here, based on a Michael Crichton novel (that should have been a heads up). The cast is headliner stuff. Dustin Hoffman is particularly convincing, Samuel Jackson plays a great type, and Liev Schreiber is sharp. Sharon Stone is a dull fourth. They bond, and realize they have things in common, in the first minutes of the film as they converge and go under water to check out an alien spaceship. Even after they are deep below the surface and beginning their unlikely exploration they make a viewer connect. As much as it borrows from "Alien" and "Aliens" this could have been a good film on its own terms. Even the talking computer/alien has its own edge compared to HAL.

What goes wrong is the plot itself, and not acting, or even directing, can overcome that. As it gets hairier, we need it to be more plausible, not less. Events get increasingly chaotic, so that action and loud noise drive some of the scenes. Subplots are continued but seem increasingly meaningless (at one point, Hoffman and Stone are rushing into the water in an absolute emergency and they start to chitchat about their distant failed love affair). And finally, as people die off and the menace becomes more ambiguous, the movie becomes completely ambiguous, and as a kind of escape valve, announces that any number of crazy thing we have been watching may or may not have been imagined by one character or another.

But what does that mean about the camera? Isn't there still a differentiation between cinema reality and one character's delusion? Or if these are global delusions including the viewer, shouldn't they do more than simply disorient us? Well, don't hang on for answers. Just hang on. An explosion (of course) caps it all off (why they didn't hit the disarm button isn't explained), and a final logical wrap up that avoids the time travel paradox is warm and fuzzy.