SPHERE |
| Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear…… First let me say that Barry Levinson succeeds where others have failed. For instance, he has succeeded in making Sharon Stone appear to have no sex appeal. Even more impressive he has succeeded in making Samuel L Jackson appear anaemic. This is really a terrible film on the whole though it does have a few redeeming features, so let’s look at them first. The claustrophobia of being locked up in a tin can at the bottom of the sea is invoked very convincingly, much better than the Abyss or old episodes of Stingray. Sharon Stone does play against type and does well considering the material. The opening sequence and the military involvement are handled quite well. The score is very effective even though it’s highly derivative of the music from Aliens. On the other hand….. the plot is awful, Dustin Hoffman plays Dustin Hoffman character-acting a mad psychologist, the effects are truly crappy for 1998, the monsters aren’t very monstrous, the ending is naff, the colour is weird and grainy (OK, maybe that’s deliberate but I didn’t like it). And that’s just for starters. Further down the page I give some criticisms which you may want to avoid if you are still determined to go and see this enterprise. If you rented this from your local video store and paid £1.50 for it you would think it was not bad and certainly better than the average straight-to-video film starring Rutger Hauer or David Carradine. If you go to the cinema and thus pay more than £1.50 to see it you will be disappointed. OK, it’s not a total turkey, but it’s not very good either. Oh yes, you might want to know what it’s about. Let me just say spacecraft at bottom of the sea, crack team of experts in something or other, storms at sea, lost contact with the surface ship, paranoia, death and the effects of a long-finished relationship. Got it? And now for more incisive and cutting remarks but please avoid if you don’t like spoilers……. . . . . . . . . So, how come a team specialising in techniques for dealing with first alien contact spend some hours baffled by the fact that streams of numbers keep scrolling past on the computer screen and that they don’t seem to be generated internally? DOH! And then, how come they take precisely 1 second to crack the conceptually difficult code? One critic I read suggested that this film is a cheap rate version of Solaris. He (or she) was wrong. This film is actually a cheap rate version of Forbidden Planet. Solaris was a very subtle exploration of how human psychology can be affected by alien intelligence. Forbidden Planet was about monsters from the id. Sphere is somewhat less satisfying than Forbidden Planet because the latter had robots, romance and good special effects even though it was made decades earlier. And I think the Cheshire Cat has stopped speaking to me because it was my idea to go and see Sphere in the first place. Go to the video shop and take a gamble. Chances are you’ll get more out of it. |