Is Sphere As Bad As Everyone Says It Is?

What is this thing, you ask? Hope you didn't want the movie to actually explain that...

Sphere is remembered by many as one of the great sci-fi stinkers of the last couple of decades. Boasting an all-star cast, with people like Dustin Hoffman, Liev Shrieber, Samuel L Jackson, and Sharon Stone (and in 1999, you’d better believe she was expensive to hire), directed by Barry Levinson, based off a book by Michael Crichton, bearing a relatively crazy (by 1998 standards) $80 million budget, etc., etc. Although Rotten Tomatoes wasn’t around when Sphere came out, it’s managed to accumulate almost 50 reviews of the film, clocking it in at a subterranean 12% approval rating. (Lower even than the other famous 90’s Crichton-inspired misfire, Congo.) I hadn’t seen it in probably ten years, but given this week’s theme of subterranean disasters and horror, I figured I’d give it a whirl again, given that it’s on Instant Streaming and I actually recall liking it the first time around. Was it really as bad as everyone says it was?

The short answer: probably so, yeah. It’s not a good movie; I think there’s enough material in it to justifiably make a Half-Good feature on it, but the early, watchable parts of it are all the more disappointing when you compare them to the disastrously incompetent latter 2/3rds of the film. The film starts promisingly, in a way that can’t help but remind a viewer of another film based on a Crichton novel, The Andromeda Strain of 1971. (Also available on Instant Streaming.) It’s perhaps telling how the two films diverge in intent after their initial half-hours, with Andromeda Strain focusing on scientists doing science, and Sphere focusing on scientists devolving into witless idiots. Why have scientists doing their job, after all, when you could have them running and screaming and dying?

The difference between the two films may demonstrate the evolution of Crichton’s thought over the twentyish years between the publications of the two books, with the films also representing his shift from believing in the ability of scientists to affect useful change in the world to a notion that scientists are, at best, well-intentioned but misguided observers of phenomena or, at worst, people who meddle with forces well beyond their control and wind up unleashing scientifically-created mayhem on the world. (See Prey, Jurassic Park and, in a similar vein, the semi-notorious State Of Fear.) Sphere is a bit more agnostic on the notion of its characters being scientists: in the film, at least, their careers and knowledge and skills quickly take a back seat to their ability to swim and yell loudly and attempt to put out fires.

Both of the films have a similar premise, as they begin with something well out-of-the-ordinary occurring. In Andromeda Strain, a satellite has crashed to Earth, and the residents of a town near the site all turn up dead for reasons unknown; in Sphere, a mysterious space ship that’s been buried underwater for 300 years is revealed to have an intelligent entity hidden inside of it. In each film, a group of scientists, familiar with each other but who don’t work together on a daily basis, are gathered up by the military under top secret conditions and flown to a site where they can analyze the new phenomena with minimal interference. As mentioned, though, the films diverge from there, in ways that make Sphere seem all the more off-putting when compared to Crichton’s earlier film.

Andromeda Strain is a film about scientists doing science: the core group of doctors and biologists are locked into an underground facility, charged with discovering precisely what the satellite held on it that could cause such widespread destruction. There is tension, of course, as the extraterrestrial germ-sized organism that fell to Earth begins to escape the safety seals on the facility and threatens to escape to the surface, causing a nuclear countdown to begin, threatening to destroy the base and everyone inside. For all that, though, this is a film that doesn’t rely on shootouts or dogfights to give an audience a thrill. While examining a piece of clothing that may contain a sample of the space bug, one scientist is insistent on going by the book, assuming nothing, checking every detail, causing the other to proclaim “You’re too good of a scientist not to be thinking what I’m thinking. If this is some new form of life...” To which the other scientist proclaims “Then the best hope of cracking it is to be grindingly thorough, with the help of computer number one: our brains!”

That is the kind of line that would probably cause your average filmgoer of today to roll their eyes, but speaking as someone who for the longest time thought they’d grow up to be a scientist, I can only say that that is the kind of dialogue that ought to be applauded in a film like this. How many movies can have a protagonist talk about being “grindingly thorough” and not have it come across as a bad thing? Nowadays such lines would be reserved for the stodgy old guy who runs the lab, unwilling to listen to the hunches and guesses of his hotshot 22-year-old assistant who knows, thanks to intuition or her ability to talk to ghosts or a psychic vision, that everything bad that could happen will happen right now unless we take immediate action. It’s a wonderful thing to see after decades of films portraying the scientific method as a laughable obstacle, a roadbump to be passed over before people get their arms ripped off by mutated catfish.

Where was I? Oh yeah, Sphere. Sphere isn’t quite as bad as some of Crichton’s other late-career science-run-amok screeds, since the problem the characters are dealing with (an apparently omnipotent, intelligent, alien life form) is not necessarily yielding to a scientific analysis, nor are the character’s scientific backgrounds themselves very relevant to the way the plot reveals itself, save for early on. There are some depressingly ludicrous scenes of the crew deciphering how the sphere has chosen to initiate dialogue, involving translating a number code into binary and the assuming that the sphere is mapping its characters onto a keyboard, starting from the letter G and then radiating outward from there. (Apologies if this doesn’t make sense; it really doesn’t in the film, either.) What’s worse is when the crew mis-interprets its speech to form a sentence: “My name is Jerry.” Later on, it’s discovered that the sentence should’ve actually been “My name Is Harry,” which of course means that the letters J, A, E, and H were all mixed up somehow, meaning the first sentence actually should’ve been something like “My nema is Jarry.” You spend all this time talking about how these are the four smartest people on the planet, possessing multiple PhD’s by the time they’re 19, and they can’t spot this?

Again, the early portions of the film are somewhat well-done, with Jackson’s logical analysis of the situation leading to some interesting conjectures. If the alien ship was actually made by humans in the future, and its crash on Earth as it traveled through time was an “unknown entry event,” then logically that means that everyone who travels underwater to study it will die, since otherwise they’ll bring back their knowledge to the surface and the future crash would presumably be a “known entry event.” That’s the kind of time-travel paradox that could be analyzed thoroughly (as it would’ve been had the film been more like The Andromeda Strain), but no: here come the killer jellyfish and the giant squid that we only see on sonar and Liev Schreiber getting his face burned off and a denouement that is so stupid it actually makes me angry.

Sphere is bad, but it’s bad in a way that actually makes me want to go back and re-read all of Crichton’s novels to trace the evolution of his scientific thought over time. I’ve read a few here and there, but not in any kind of sequential order; he apparently wrote a series of memoirs in the late 80’s that described his experiences researching auras, clairvoyance, out of body experiences, and the like. I can only suspect that such thinking fed into his writing of the Sphere novel a bit, expounding as it does on ideas like physical manifestations of the thoughts of its characters. As a film, I remember being intrigued by it on first viewing, but a decade later, I have a much easier time recognizing it as the woefully malformed, confusing concoction that all the contemporary viewers seemed to see.

But hey, at least it takes place underwater.

What do you think? Have you seen Sphere lately? Does it deserve its mega-awful reputation, or is it actually worth defending?