| A wise friend, who had joined our party for the previous film (The Big Lebowski, talk about your contrast), refused to sneak into Sphere after the other movie because, "We have nothing to sphere but Sphere itself." Oh, if he only knew how right he was. |
I don't think it's unreasonable for movie goers these days to expect competency from all levels of movie makers. With the enormous insurgence of the independent movie scene, the bar has been raised to where we expect kids from the ghetto to be able to churn out an interesting narrative on their dad's black and white 8mm camera. A movie that someone saw fit to not only green light but throw $60,000,000 at should at least be amusing. That money could have fed the poor!
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| Sphere has a pedigree: we expect it to deliver. Barry Levinson, Academy Award-winning director of Rain Man, Dustin Hoffman, Oscar winning star of same, and current (and multiple) nominee. Samuel L Jackson, not frequently nominated but widely recognized as awesome. Sharon Stone, underrated and one- time nominee. Liev Schrieber, the hardest-working indie boy in show business, giving his all even when he's in a cesspit like Phantoms. Michael Crichton, former director (Coma, Westworld), producer of ER, and crowd-pleasing author (Jurassic Park, anyone?). With all these people, shouldn't Sphere at least have been PALATABLE? To the movie's credit, the opening titles were quite cool. |
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We snuck guiltily into the almost-empty theatre, already prepared to hate it. But we were ill prepared, all the same. The whole movie is telegraphed with every snit of silly, overtechnical dialogue: "You'll be pressurized sufficiently so that you could even swim out in the water without a suit, in case you need to do that in the third reel when everything goes horribly wrong, but the water will be really cold, OK?" ??? --- ???! |
| They were worshipping at the altar of Samuel Morse. It was nice to see one scene where Jackson totally walks all over Hoffman's dialed in performance. Wham! Hugely overdramatic score and wildly uninteresting dialogue. Hideous editing - and I never notice editing. |
| Sphere was horrible, stupid, useless, illogical, overly bright and underly written. Ghastly. With the job market like it is, they expected me and my friends to fork out $6.75 (I know it's $9 in NY) to be subjected to this embarrassing low tech piece of doo doo. I am so pissed, I haven't been this pissed since Anaconda! I expected Anaconda to suck, between silly plot lines and B-list actors, I expected silly camp. Fortunately, I read Sphere, so I just expected some decent acting and maybe some cool special effects. |
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Oh, no. Matte paintings of underwater scapes that make Star Trek: Next Generation look like Braveheart. Jerry, the angry UMAX box who only taps into the stupid parts of our subconscious. But it had no millennium bug - it's a Starmax Mac!
I don't tend to give away plot in reviews but 1. there is none and 2. who cares? The preview gives away the only interesting aspect of the movie which then *does nothing with it!* Basically the sphere kind of gets in people's heads and like, digs out the worst part of them and then manifests it. So Samuel L Jackson is reading 20,000 Leagues under the sea, so they are attacked by a giant squid. |
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Of course, no one is thinking of the Baywatch babes attacking the undersea habitat. It all goes downhill from here. The people behave stupidly (build a habitat for months then train a bunch of specialist yahoos in 8 hrs how to dive in the unforgiving deep ocean) and just the thought of Dustin Hoffman and Sharon Stone naked together should have been enough to implode the sphere. I don't think I need to detail the incredibly Abyss-mal derivativeness of the thing as well, do I? |
Though after Jackson wakes up after being knocked out, and has a voracious appetite, my friends and I all manifested an alien bursting out of is chest. That would have helped. So would have drowning the increasingly abrasive Hoffman, like in the Abyss, only without reviving him. Oh and hello? Lifeboat too small? Which movie is that stolen from?
It's corny, bad, disappointing, and annoying. Miss it! Miss it! It's like Event Horizon without the cool parts. We walked in fearing the movie would be bad and sure enough, it manifested itself right there! Oh if only we, like the undeserving survivors at the end, had the power to forget. But it was vaguely better than Airport 75. Yuck. |
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