A couple of classic exceptions notwithstanding (The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park), Hollywood hasn’t really done right by Michael Crichton. More often than not, something gets lost in the transition from book to film, maybe because some of Crichton’s ideas and concepts are a major challenge to put on-screen, or maybe too many behind-the-scenes decisions are being made by the wrong people. Probably the latter.
This was especially disheartening with 1998’s Sphere, which I was looking really forward to at the time because Crichton’s book was terrific. On a rudimentary level, the movie is more-or-less faithful to the novel, but the execution was not what I expected…from the atmosphere, tone & pace to the character depictions. At almost no point did I feel like I was watching the same story that thrilled me just a few years earlier.
Were my expectations simply too high? That’s entirely possible. After all, I remember Stephen King’s The Shining scaring the hell out of me, then being initially pissed at how much Stanley Kubrick bastardized it for the big screen. But later, I managed to disassociate my love for the book and appreciate the film on its own terms. Two-and-a-half decades later, perhaps Sphere deserved a second chance, too.
Unlike Kubrick’s The Shining, which opened to middling critical and audience response but has mostly been reassessed as a masterpiece, there’s been no retroactive love for Sphere. But knowing what to expect the second time around, I did enjoy the film a bit more than I once did. While it still has more than its share of issues (pacing, miscasting, overlength and a somewhat convoluted narrative), Sphere isn’t without effective moments, including some tension-filled sequences that instill a proper sense of foreboding.
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| "Why don't we just roll it outta here?" |
That ain’t the entire plot, but since Sphere relies on a few story twists during the second half - some surprising, some silly - I won’t elaborate any further (there’s no statute of limitations on spoilers, kids). I will say that the film (therefore Crichton himself) certainly owes a tip of the hat to such classics as Forbidden Planet and Solaris. I guess if you’re familiar with those titles, perhaps I did just spoil things a little bit.
Elsewhere, Sphere is rife with miscasting, starting at the top with Dustin Hoffman and Sharon Stone, neither of whom are right choice for their characters (the latter is actually pretty terrible). Samuel L. Jackson has his moments here and there, but overall, his role could’ve been played by anyone. And maybe director Barry Levinson wasn’t the right guy for the job to begin with. Primarily known at the time for such down-to-Earth films as Good Morning Vietnam, Avalon and Rain Man, FX-driven science-fiction might have been out way of his comfort zone (though he would later direct The Bay, one of the nastiest, most criminally-underrated sci-fi horror movies of the last 20 years).
Still, without the baggage of elevated expectations, I did find Sphere more fun this time around. The story (however derivative) is sometimes interesting and a few sequences are genuinely creepy (such as Queen Latifah’s ill-fated jellyfish encounter). With its expensive cast, solid visual effects and impressive production design, the money is certainly up there on the screen. So is it deserving of critical reassessment? Probably not, but while everyone involved on both sides of the camera have done better work, they’ve also done far worse.
This is a re-issue of a Blu-ray first released in 2009.
EXTRA KIBBLES
FEATURETTE - Shaping the Sphere: The Art of the Visual Effects Supervisor.
AUDIO COMMENTARY - By Dustin Hoffman and Samuel L. Jackson. This one is actually kind of interesting.
TRAILER & TV SPOTS
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