SPHERE |
| Rumours are abound that I have stopped talking to the Lizard because it was he who
persuaded me to see Sphere. Well the rumours are false - I am still talking to him.
However, it must be said that as we left the matinee last week I informed him that if his
ability to choose restaurants was as poor as his ability to choose films then I could not
see myself ever dining with him. Of course I regretted this afterwards, not for chastising
the Lizard, whose misguided loyalty to Ms Stone is legendary, but for neglecting my civic
duty to the queuing cinema-goers. I could have used the precious few seconds to warn them
to go and see something else. The story follows a team of investigators who are called, one by one, to a top-secret location to investigate a top-secret secret. The team, however, are anything but top-secret to each other having all met/slept with/lusted after/admired/inspired/fondled each others top secret bits before. Then by the end not even their darkest fears are top-secret to each other, and they all get to share a top-secret secret. Perhaps it is the air of secrecy that makes the film so terrible. Or perhaps it is because it is a complex concoction of half-baked ideas and ill thought out concepts. On paper, the combination of an underwater sci-fi yarn with Hoffman, Jackson and Stone probably looked as if it had potential. However, the plot is riddled with holes so vast that the titanic could happily perform a three point turn and the ensemble cast are truly are wasted. Stone is good, even though the lines she is given would make a shopping channel presenter cringe. The normally excellent Jackson seems oddly detached, and although the so-called plot calls for this, it seems as if he simply gave up delivering his lines with any care or conviction five minutes into the film. Hoffman plays a psychologist character so beloved by 1980s soap operas and is as enjoyable as finding blood on your toilet paper. The special effects are a mixed bag of survivable, terrible and laughable. But there
is, at times, some suspense and a feeling of claustrophobia. The underwater photography is
suitable dower and the attention to watery detail is total. Spoiler Alert. Where the film truly fails is in its blatant rip-off from the excellent Forbidden Planet, and by association, from the Tempest. Forbidden Planet handled the idea with far more panache and had much better special effects to boot. Monsters from the Id croaked the Doc before he died. Well it is hard to believe that any conscious or subconscious could come up with a film as flawed as Sphere. I cant even be bothered to list the flaws, instead I shall present a four word summary: Gold Plated Balls-Up. |