Sphere (1998)

From yet another derivative science fiction novel by Michael Crichton comes this equally derivative and flaccid movie, in which three top Hollywood stars struggle to squeeze tension and excitement out of material that doesn't match their talents. You're supposed to find awe and mystery in Crichton's story about a team of scientists and scholars who discover a 300-year-old alien spacecraft deep on the ocean floor, but mostly you feel that this is all much ado about nothing. The exploration team consists of a psychologist (Dustin Hoffman), mathematician (Samuel L. Jackson), biochemist (Sharon Stone), and an astrophysicist (Liev Schreiber), and when they enter the alien ship they discover a mysterious sphere inside. What they don't know is that the sphere has the power to manipulate their thoughts and perceptions, and before long the scientists' undersea habitat is a veritable haunted house of frightening visions and creeping paranoia. Who can be trusted? What is the sphere's purpose, and why is it on the ocean floor? Sphere makes some attempt to answer these questions, but the film is a mess, and it leads to one of the most anticlimactic endings of any science fiction film ever made. There are moments of high intensity and psychological suspense, and the stellar cast works hard to boost the talky screenplay. But it's clear that this was a hurried production (Hoffman and director Barry Levinson made Wag the Dog during an extended production delay), and as a result Sphere looks and feels like a film that wasn't quite ready for the cameras. Though it's by no means a waste of time, it's undeniably disappointing. The special edition DVD includes audio commentary by Hoffman and Jackson and a behind-the-scenes featurette, Shaping the Sphere: The Art of the Special Effects Supervisor, exploring the alien ship's design and creation by special effects technicians. --Jeff Shannon Amazon.com

I Liked It !!

I love movies that I have to figure out and so on that point I'm really feeling this movie. Not only was the movie itself good, but it was also scary at times, and there was plenty of suspense. We get a lot of "what" but very few "whys" so it keeps you kind of glued. Like everyone else I don't like the ending. They could have gone in so many other directions with the ending but they went with the strangest one. The remaining charachters decided to just "forget" everything that happened....ummm...??? Ok. This movie was a lot like the Event Horizon. I loved the Event Horizon also. I'd encourage anyone to see. May 24, 2008

OK For Fun

This movie starts out with some great special effects and introduces some very intriguing questions about the nature of time and space.

Those questions are never fully answered though as far as I noticed.

They discover an apparent extra terrestrial space craft that has been in the ocean since the 1700s and go down and explore it. But as the movie goes on you realize nothing is quite what it appears to be and anything that people can imagine is possible.

You have to use your imagination quite a bit with these types of movies. For example how likely is it that three people with no training could do everything required to operate an underwater military facility ?

There's the typical latches that are easy to manually open to let all of the water from the ocean into the lab, etc., and then close them again with no major effects. I guess the design of those latches hasn't changed much since World War 1.

I'm not sure Dustin Hoffman was a great casting job for the role of one of the scientists. Actually for me his role sort of provides comic relief. I don't think action / SciFi is a great venue for Hoffman. Still it was nice to see him in a movie anyway for old times' sake. In that sense maybe it was a good role for him.

Sharon Stone is looking good still.

I think I have heard Peter Coyote on some documentaries that he narrated. He has a great voice for narrating tv shows.

Jeff Marzano

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Boring. No suspense. The plot is ridiculous.

This movie is boring. There's no suspense or action. The plot is ridiculous. The special effects are not insteresting.

Save your money on this one. February 24, 2008

Good except for the ending **SPOILER**

You will like this movie if you enjoy watching movies where the plot revolves around technology, the ocean and, of course, underwater scenes. The CGI effects are very good. Most noteable is a scene where hundreds of jelly fish surround and kill a diver. The plot in this movie centers around the 3 main characters going undersea to investigate a spaceship that was found sitting on the ocean floor. Within the spaceship, they find a giant gold ball which seems to affect them by making their dreams come true. Unfortuately, instead of dreaming about world peace, they only dream about scary things like snakes or wild jelly fish. So in the end, the 3 make their way to the surface of the ocean and are sitting in a room on the recovery ship, waiting to be interviewed by the military about what they had found. The 3 decide they don't want to tell the military about this "power" they have of making dreams come true so they agree they will just "forget about it". The 3 join hands and on the count of 1, 2, 3 they forget about it. Next, the ball rises up from the ocean floor and soars up and out into space. It's gone. They wished it away. The End. Yes---that's how it ends. February 17, 2008

Oscillating between too many models

We can recognize the various models that are at work in this film and we are amazed how strong they can be. Aliens of course, but at the bottom of some ocean abyss and some spacecraft that got buried deep down there and that can only liberate itself with the psychic energy of some humans who it attracts into a sphere and then suck up dry: it feeds and regenerates on the fears of three human beings that it has been able to invite inside that living sphere. Stephen King's Tommyknockers are not very far. And the black hole in the cosmos, the force that takes over the computers and machine of the submarine of course recalls the Space Odyssey to our minds. And the deep sea abyss, the monstrous octopus, the submarines ring many bells that summon Jules Verne in a nearly obsessive way. But there is something missing in this complex fabric. It is too contradictory to be satisfactory. How come this force that can only liberate itself from its wrecked position will use the three people it manages to invade to destroy all the others and then one another? That living sphere can only take off if these three human beings join their minds to erase their memory of what happened and donate their mental power to the sphere. If they succeeded in destroying one another the sphere would be trapped forever. So why manipulate them into that kind of an ending that liberates the sphere for sure but that is absurd like some kind of divine power that comes like a streak of out of place absurdity? What's more the woman of the trio has been manipulated into setting so powerful a bomb that everything will get destroyed miles away and around, including of course the three humans trapped down under the water. All that is illogical too. It is not enough to say that this poor being, but is it a being, has been trapped under the water for three centuries to explain these discrepancies. A better job could have been devised more in the line of Jules Verne or Stephen King or Kubrick, but probably not the three without counting the aliens and their eggs. That makes things slightly too labyrinthine and sibylline, enigmatic and mysterious and it destroys the utter pleasure we expect: to be confronted to something inescapable, something so logical that it takes a stronger, hence human logic to defeat it, and yet only for some kind of short resting interlude. The defeat and victory of that sphere, if that cosmic calamity comes literally by accident, haphazardly.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
December 9, 2007

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