Sphere - Die Macht aus dem All

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.

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.

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.

A spaceship is discovered under three hundred years' worth of coral growth at the bottom of the ocean.

Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 12% based on 50 reviews, with the critical consensus that "Sphere features an A-level cast working with B-grade material, with a story seen previously in superior science-fiction films." Indeed, one wonders what Sharon Stone and Dustin Hoffman were doing in this. Hoffman, of course, was brought on by the director, his friend Barry Levinson. But Stone should have had better projects.

Some aspects of this are interesting, and even though it was a flop at the time, I could see people today (2015) going back and really giving it a second chance. It has not become a better film with age, but it has something to say about science fiction films of the 1990s. (Most, it seems, were dystopian, so this is something of a fresh change.)

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.