Sphere

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.

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.

Fantastic performances from some true talent. Wonderful direction from a great artist. Some well executed sequences of horror and suspense. An interesting first-act. Wonderful music and design. And a fairly good piece of source material in the form of a Michael Crichton novel.

I just don't get how "Sphere" wasn't a wonderful film!

You can feel so much potential in that opening half-hour. And there are so many good elements at play. But it just sort-of falls apart at times. It feels unfinished. (A sentiment also echoed by one of its stars, Dustin Hoffman.) It feels like it could use some tightening in some spots, some additional scenes in other places, some more work with the pacing and maybe a re-shoot or two. Then it could be a great, wonderful film. As it is now, it's merely "ok."

When a team consisting of a psychologist, mathematician, biologist and an astrophysicist are sent 1,000 feet below the surface of the ocean to investigate what could be an crashed alien spaceship, things take a bizarre turn when two revelations are unveiled. First, the ship might actually be human in origin, and second... a mysterious spherical object is found in storage on the ship, and it's influence could lead to the brink of disaster.

The performances are almost universally incredible in this film. Featuring the aforementioned Dustin Hoffman, we are also treated to the likes of Samuel L. Jackson, Sharon Stone, Liev Schreiber, Queen Latifah and Peter Coyote. And all are able to make a good impact, even when the script and storyline don't give them too much development as characters. The talent elevates the experience.

Director Barry Levinson does some incredible work here as well. Levinson (responsible for some great films) really treats the audience with a combination of intimacy and spectacle from scene to scene. His sense of storytelling, like the acting, elevates the entire feature. (Particularly admirable are some great scenes of horror and suspense. Levinson makes some interesting choices as to what he chooses to show and what he chooses to hide.)

And many other aspects of the production are equally high in quality. Elliot Goldenthal's score is magnificent and haunting. The cinematography of Adam Greenberg is perfect and gives a great aesthetic. Visual and practical effects are almost uniformly excellent. (Save for one or two "gory" effects that don't quite work.) Everything here just seems to work.

The problem, as said above, is that the film sadly doesn't feel finished. And I can't place my finger on any specific aspect of it that fails. It just needs... more work. Some parts of the film feel overlong and in need of trimming. Other parts are abrupt and feel like scenes and shots are missing. Some moments feel contrived and out of context. The pacing is all over the map. And it betrays everything that works so well. It's just a bit too sloppy in its current form.

I honestly think that if the film was given another month or so of time for post-production and editing (and maybe a week or two of re-shoots), it would have been infinitely better. Heck, it might have even been great.

But as is, the film's troubled storytelling and inconsistent pacing all but ruin the experience. Although I will contend that there is enough good here to make "Sphere" worth checking out. Even if only once for the sake of curiosity.

I give it about an average 6 out of 10. I'd say check it out if you see it on cable or available to rent. You just might like it.

After reading many users' mixed comments on the movie..i can't help but feel that a majority have underrated the film. True it could have been better, especially in the latter half, but having read the book first, i did not feel it actually falling off midway like the way other viewers have described it. People who have read the novel will acknowledge that the movie does follow the novel fairly closely. Thus comments about Hoffman's role and the ending are unfair, since i feel they are the closest big-screen reproductions of one of Crichton's best works. I feel Stone's character was the role followed the weakest.

Definitely the giant squid thrills are insufficient (note that Crichton devoted a good part of his novel describing encounters with 'the monster'). I guess animation artists were short budgeted...though the film as a whole still is a visual treat...and the atmosphere is rightly captured, with nice music.

Overall, I think the movie is worth watching and is definitely of a much higher caliber than 'The Lost World'. It follows a psychological-cum-sci-fi thriller theme and i feel is better than the similar flick 'Abyss'. As from the novel's point-of-view...it could have been done better though. 8/10 stars!

It is 2017 and I'm still discovering movies from the 90's that are worth a peek.

The government has discovered a space craft buried beneath some coral in the Pacific Ocean. The government concludes that this must be an opportunity at alien contact so they grab a team of scientists to make the first contact. Within the crashed vessel they find a shimmering sphere. A few of the scientist decide to enter it and then things get weird.

I liked the cast: Sharon Stone, Samuel L. Jackson, Dustin Hoffman, Liev Schrieber, Queen Latifah et al. The setting was very claustrophobic as they spent the majority of the movie 1000 feet beneath the surface surrounded by water. Once people started being killed by odd creatures it was race to figure out what or who was causing this before they all perished.

This movie was really about man's inability to handle alien gifts/technology. That's a lesson we've learned many times over. The movie got a bit confusing towards the end as they tried to solve the mystery of who/what was the cause of the death and destruction. I felt there were a lot of holes in the movie and it left me a bit unfulfilled.