Esfera

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.

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!

Excellent! I went into the film thinking it would be bad, since that is what I had heard from someone before watching it.

However, I was pleasantly surprised at what a terrific film this actually was. The only downfall to the film, was Dustin Hoffman. With all due respect to one of the best actors ever, he just wasn't suited for this particular role. He was good in it, but just not the right person for the job.

The film begins with Dustin Hoffman flying over the Pacific Ocean in a helicopter, going to a Submarine investigating a plane crash. As a psychologist, he is impatiently waiting to speak to the survivors, and after having been on the sub for over 3 hours, is upset with the Capatain. However, the Captain informs him there was no plane crash, but rather an arrival of some sort not quite 300 years ago, under the Ocean.

Sharon Stone, Leive Shreiber and Samuael L. Jackson join Hoffman as apart of his team, to go beneath the surface to discover and determine what it is exactly that they have found under the Pacific.

With complete intensity and excitement non-stop throughout the entire film, it will leave you feeling a little disturbed at times, and perhaps a bit paranoid, also.

I would advice anyone who does not have a liking to intense sci-fi type films...this is not going to be your cup of tea, but for those enjoy good horror, intensity and a great story line, you will definitely enjoy this flick!

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.

This is the rarest of action films - one that engages your intellect not just your senses.

On the seabed in mid-ocean a huge vessel is discovered. A team is dispatched to investigate - and what they find is beyond belief.

Admittedly there were a couple of scenes which I felt missed the intended realism of the film, and occasionally it seemed far too obvious what was going on, but the ending resolved everything beautifully.

I suspect that fans of action films will feel let down by the thought necessary to follow this film, and fans of science fiction may well feel that after the first half hour there is a lack of a traditional sci-fi element. Many people I'm sure will feel that too little is explained, but the point of the film is that it doesn't need to be - the message of the ending is strong enough that we don't need explanation.

I'd particularly recommend this film to anyone who likes psychological thrillers. I was fairly impressed by the action integrated in The Abyss, but Sphere far surpasses it in terms of plot. Most of all, if you like films that simply entertain, this is not for you. It's more about the reactions it causes in you when you follow the story. If you come away from this film unchanged, you've missed the point.