Sphere: Blu-ray Movie Review (2009)

Directed by Barry Levinson. Based on the novel by Michael Crichton, written for the screen by Stephan Hauser and Paul Attanasio, 132 minutes, rated PG-13.

Toward the end of Barry Levinson’s unfortunate film adaptation of Michael Crichton’s 1987 best-selling novel, “Sphere,” which has just been released on Blu-ray disc, three of the film’s principal actors--Dustin Hoffman, Samuel L. Jackson and Sharon Stone--gather in a circle, hold hands, and agree to forget all that has taken place in the past two hours.

They actually do this. No one in their respective entourages stopped them. They close their eyes and vow to forget it all.

And why not?

“Sphere” is the clumsy, slow-moving and unsatisfying story of an extraterrestrial spacecraft found deep beneath the Pacific Ocean. Covered with 300 years’ worth of coral, the ship still emits a distant hum--suggesting that it is intact and that life might still exist on board. When a scientific team of four--Hoffman as psychologist Norman Goodman, Jackson as mathematician Harry Adams, Stone as biochemist Beth Halperin, and Liev Schreiber as astrophysicist Ted Fielding--is called in by the government to investigate, the film wastes no time in getting them to the bottom of the ocean and aboard that ship, where filmgoers expect great suspense and action to be lurking at every corner.

It’s not.

In spite of the huge, intoxicating golden sphere the team finds undulating on board the spacecraft, the horrific potential in that sphere neveris fully realized because director Levinson is too timid, too hurried, or too dense to explore what it truly means. So lost in--or so enamored by--the film’s mindless psychobabble, he forgets that this film was supposed to be a thriller, which it isn’t.

His characters get even less development. He presents a team of scientists we know nothing about, and thus care nothing for, which robs the film of any dramatic tension when they are put in harm’s way. As for Levinson’s sets, they prove to be the cheap sort of fare we’d see in a bad television movie. The writing is no better.

But what is so disturbing about “Sphere” is that Levinson, whose previous films include “Rain Man,” “Disclosure” and “Wag the Dog,” has stolen brazenly and repeatedly from other films in a failed effort to make this one work.

The film’s premise is ripped straight from Stanislaw Lem’s science-fiction classic “Solaris,” the scene in which the actors plunge into the abyss was handled with greater suspense and verve in James Cameron’s “The Abyss,” and the ship’s talking computer is nothing more than a dull, humorless rip-off of HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

For a film that spends so much time beneath the ocean depths, “Sphere” certainly goes out of its way to prove itself a film of little depth.

Grade: D