Underwater science fiction stays submerged
Sphere A Film Review By Michael Redman Copyright 1998 By Michael Redman
*1/2 (out of ****)
One of the most unpleasant experiences that can occur in a movie theater is when a cast of fine actors end up in a film that wastes their talents. You keep thinking what they might have accomplished with the time they squandered.
Psychologist Norman Goodman (Dustin Hoffman) is called to the middle of the Pacific Ocean to work with the survivors of a plane crash. When he arrives at the site, he discovers that there is no plane, but rather an enormous spacecraft that has been sitting 1,000 feet below the surface for almost 300 years.
Having written a paper for the Bush administration on how to handle first contact, he is chosen to head up the team of scientists investigating the ship. His group as outlined in his report, consists of Beth Halperin (Sharon Stone), a biochemist; Harry Adams (Samuel L. Jackson), a mathematician; and Ted Fielding (Liev Schreiber), an astrophysicist.
Unfortunately it turns out that the writing was a blow-off project for Goodman who did it for the money and named his then-colleagues to the team. "After all," he explains, "who reads government documents?"
Lead by Harold Barnes (Peter Coyote), a top secret federal operative, the group descends to a mobile undersea headquarters set up next to the alien vessel. Once there they stroll over, knock on the door and explore the still-operational UFO. Discovering the surprising origin of the ship and the crew finds an astonishing gigantic golden liquid metal sphere. When Adams enters the sphere, the weirdness unfolds.
A storm rolls in on the surface and the team is forced to remain below just as an unseen presence begins to communicate through their computer. "My name is Jerry. I am happy" flashes across the screen. This is unsettling for the psychologist. "What happens if Jerry gets mad?" he asks. Barnes is more pragmatic: he needs a last name because he can't put in his report that they made contact with an alien named Jerry.
Then the situation turns bad. Deadly beasts appear from nowhere. A gang of jellyfish kills one of the Navy personnel. Lethal sea snakes attack Goodman. A giant squid batters the habitat just as Adams is reading "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea". The suspicious scientists turn against each other.
This has all the makings of a first-rate thinking man's science fiction film. However even the finest ingredients don't go very far in the hands of a chief who doesn't seem to care about his product. Director Barry Levinson has churned out a mish-mosh that doesn't engage the audience beyond a few skillful suspense scenes.
The first of the film zooms by as the situation and players are introduced without any characterization or justification. It's much like speed-reading a novel and realizing that you missed the nuances. It doesn't get any better when the action scenes begin.
While the actors do an adequate job with their limited roles, the people are still flat. Oddly they hardly have reactions when deaths occur around them. After Adams experiences the interior of the sphere, no one bothers to ask him what happened. Their history together is an intriguing plot device but is barely exploited. Even Goodman and Halperin's ill-conceived affair when she was his student is just mentioned in passing. Her psychotic tendencies are talked about but never convincing.
There's a truism that items shown early in a movie must be used before the ending, but here they are far too obvious. When an emergency mini-sub is explained, you know what's going to happen.
The movie affectations are nothing more than distracting. Chapter headings that divide the movie have no function. The shaky camera work muddies already perplexing chaos. Much of what goes on is confusing and difficult to follow. Although some of the disorientation eventually is understandable, a great deal of it isn't.
Even a science fiction film must be internally consistent. There's too much here that doesn't make sense. Are the manifestations real? The jellyfish kill Queen Latifa (in a throw-away role) and the squid nearly destroys the outpost, but the bites of the fatal snakes have no effect. A scene in the sub suggests that it's illusion, but earlier episodes indicate that it's not.
Not everything has to be explained to death, but there are major questions that the film never answers. Where the ship came from is clarified, but how it ended up on the ocean floor in 1709 is merely alluded to. Even the enigmatic sphere is still mysterious when the credits roll.
The climax is followed by 15 minutes of epilogue that does little but weaken the already labored tale. After pre-release audience testing, the actors were called back to re-shoot the ending. It's difficult to imagine how the original could have been worse.
Following the recent tradition of lengthy films, this weighs in at over two very long hours. The weak scenes could have been cut, but then there wouldn't have been much left. The movie was supposedly held up by effects work, but there's nothing special on the screen. We never even see the monstrous squid or the menacing storm. Stealing from "Alien", "The Abyss" and the disastrous "Event Horizon", this film has learned nothing from them.
Remarkably Levinson and Hoffman's other currently showing film is "Wag The Dog", a smart and entertaining piece of work. This one could have been titled the same sans one word.
(Michael Redman has written this column for over 23 years and is amazed that the Wild Raccoons Party Mardi is next week. It seems like only a year since the last one. Redman@bvoice.com is the magical electronic eaddress.)
[This appeared in the 2/19/98 "Bloomington Voice" Bloomington, Indiana. Michael Redman can be contacted at redman@bvoice.com]
-- mailto:redman@bvoice.com This week's film review at http://www.bvoice.com/ Film reviews archive at http://us.imdb.com/M/reviews_by?Michael%20Redman
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