Subject: Review: Sphere (1998)

From: [email-masked] (p-m agapow)
Date: 9 May 1998 16:38:46 GMT

# [film] "Sphere"
A Postview, copyright p-m agapow 1998

A mysterious big alien thingie is found at the bottom of the ocean. 
The inevitable team of experts are taken down to it, left alone and
get on each others nerves before dying one by one.

"Sphere" may not be the worst Michael Crichton novel ever written, but 
then I haven't read "Binary" or "Rising Sun".  They'd have to try hard 
to beat the monosyllabic, shaggy-dog story-telling of "Sphere" the 
novel.  So, while a film of "Sphere" shouldn't be good, it can't be 
worse than its source.

But it is, yessiree.  Unfortunately, it's not bad enough to be an 
enjoyable Bad Movie, just bad enough to be tedious.

The setup is this: a mile-long (aerodynamically streamlined!)  
starship is found on the ocean floor with a large golden disco-ball 
within.  Obviously this is a case for an elite alien contact team.  
Alas, they have to make do with one headed by the narcolepsy inducing 
Dustin Hoffman.  Inevitably, a storm traps them in their seafloor base 
for the (also inevitable) monster attack.

That setup is hardly promising, but things get worse.  A military 
sidekick to the team (Queen Latifah) gets smothered by a large swarm 
of jellyfish.  As Sharon Stone (wittilly cast against type as a genius 
marine biologist / medico / biochemist / drug-addict) extracts 
tendrils from the dead Latifah's nostrils, Hoffman honks insincerely: 
"It must have been terrible.  I can't imagine the pain."  Even more 
ludicrously, we are asked to believe that the prelapsarian Hoffman and 
wonderbuff Stone were lovers.  (Stone's faux-dyke cropped hair and 
bulging eyes makes her looks positively hydrocephalic.)  Samuel L 
Jackson pops up as a brilliant mathematician with attitude who gets 
knocked out before he can do his badass shtick.  Later, the whiny 
astrophysicist (who is not a big-name actor) gets capped because he 
is not a big-name actor, and his colleagues activate the station defence 
system which starts electrical fires every time it is used. Stone 
decides that the best way to get everyone's attention is to plant 
explosives everywhere.  Slap in the fact they never explain what the 
sphere actually is or what it's doing on board the starship, the lazy 
performances, ho-hum direction, plot inanities ...

There is one good moment, where a plausible explanation for 
assembling such a disparate team is revealed.  But this is one dull 
ember in a black hole of a movie.  Barry Levison has done much better 
than this.  [*/misfire] and extracting wisdom teeth on the Sid and 
Nancy scale.

"Sphere"
Released 1998.
Directed by Barry Levinson.
Starring Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, Samuel L. Jackson, Peter 
	Coyote, Liev Schreiber, Queen Latifah.

--
paul-michael agapow ([email-masked]), La Trobe Uni, Infocalypse
"There is no adventure, there is no romance, there is only trouble and desire."