BEFORE: OK, I know I'm running a day or two late, I was supposed to start the big Summer Music Concert series already, but I'm just going to squeeze one more in here, because this one's been on my DVR since last August, and I need to free up some space. I've got new movies coming in all this month... This film has a cast of only 12, but really only four or five that are usable links. Sure, I could reschedule it and put it with another Samuel Jackson film like the most recent "Shaft" film, but then what would I do for an outro? Better to burn it off here, I think, between two other films with Sharon Stone, and I'll start the Summer Music Concert series tomorrow, I promise.
Sharon Stone carries over from "The Laundromat".
THE PLOT: A spaceship is discovered under coral growth at the bottom of the ocean.
AFTER: I know this is the year for Weird Movies, but WTF? This is a really weird one, not from a storytelling format sense (well, kinda, maybe) or a flashback/time-twisty sense (well, kinda, maybe) but from more of a just-plain-terrible story idea standpoint. Narrative films have really been letting me down in the last few days, like "Hot Rod" sucked and then "The Laundromat" was a mess, and now this. Maybe it's a great time to switch over to concerts and documentaries for a couple weeks.
To really pick this story apart today, I'm going to have to talk about it in detail, so here's a rare (for me) SPOILER ALERT - if you want to preserve the delicate narrative details of "Sphere", and like me you haven't found the time since 1998 to get around to watching it, please stop reading here, or go watch "Sphere" if you can and then meet me back here, OK? Good.
The first 30 minutes of the film is just build-up, getting the team together, a team that needs to be assembled because the U.S. Navy has found what appears to be an alien spacecraft on the ocean floor, so they follow some government recommendation for putting together a team for this exact situation, namely a psychologist (to initiate contact with alien life), an astrophysicist (to determine where the aliens came from), a mathematician (because, umm, I don't know, apparently math is universal or something) and a marine biologist (just in case the contact would be made underwater - so, umm, how did the government pamphlet know this would happen?) I smell some NITPICK POINTS coming into play here.
For the sake of expediency and convenience, the psychologist picked for the response team is also the same psychologist who wrote the report for the government on who to put on the team. Wait, he recommended HIMSELF for the position? I guess that's a form of job security, or maybe he just always wanted to be the one to talk to the aliens, if they ever landed. And then to save time, he recommended a bunch of his friends and colleagues for the team, just in case they ever put the team together or made a movie about it, there wouldn't be that awkward "getting to know you" phase. But the marine biologist he recommended for the team, in the very very unlikely event that first contact would happen underwater, was a woman he had an affair with, someone who also had a nervous breakdown or a suicide attempt or something. Sure, that sounds like a perfect candidate for someone to recommend for a high-pressure inter-galactic situation, why not? I guess he kind of owed her, after breaking up with her? Still, it's a NITPICK POINT, because this is someone he would probably want to AVOID in the future, not be on a response team with. Also, this is somehow set in an alternate universe where somebody who looks like Dustin Hoffman can score with someone who looks like mid-1990's Sharon Stone? That seems impossible.
But I digress again. The response team is supposed to just live in a nearby underwater habitat while the alien vessel is investigated by the military - so they go through a rigorous process of getting their bodies accustomed to living in the pressure of the deep ocean, just on the extremely unlikely chance that something is alive down there, and they'll need to enter the vessel. (Umm, guess what...) The team determines from the coral build-up that the vessel has been on the ocean floor for nearly 300 years, which could be possible - alien civilizations may not be on the same timetable as humans, and could have developed spaceflight before we did. But when they finally find the aliens' bodies, they look suspiciously human - and one's wearing a DisneyWorld t-shirt and holding a can of beer, so the only logical conclusion is that an alien civilization developed exactly like we did, only earlier!
Just kidding - the "simple" answer to this conundrum involves some form of time travel, the ship logs are in English, and the date of the last entry ends in the year "43", so the spaceship must be from 2043, or 2143, or maybe 1643, they're just not sure. (seriously?) There's also a giant, golden glowing sphere (ah yes, the title of the film...) in the spaceship's hold, so the only logical conclusion to draw here is that an American spacecraft went out into space to get this thing, flew into or too close to a black hole, and somehow went back in time hundreds of years, to arrive back on earth during colonial times, at which point they crashed into the ocean. Yes, the pilot was good enough to fly through a black hole and then find the earth again (though it would have been in a different position in the universe, thanks to the time travel) but not good enough to allow the ship to survive re-entry. (Again, REALLY? This is a story point we're going to plant our flag on?)
Well, great news, there are no aliens, and we accidentally solved the riddles of black holes, and the mystery of time travel, so the team is no longer needed, everyone can go home and not worry about the big mysterious, golden, shimmering sphere that's perfectly harmless in every way. Thanks for your service, and the CIA will be eliminating you soon enough, so get your affairs in order, AND movie over. BUT WAIT, there's a coincidence typhoon coming to the area the spacecraft is under, so the useless team has to stay underwater for a couple more days - what could POSSIBLY go wrong during that time? Well, a lot, as things turn out. The team members get attacked by giant squids and impossibly aggressive jellyfish (which, umm, isn't even a thing, I think)
At this point, the mathematician uses time travel logic to determine that the entire response team is doomed - because if they survive, there will be a historical record of the spaceship being found, and then in the future, the crew of the spaceship would then know in advance about the black hole that they're scheduled to encounter, and they would take the appropriate safeguards to avoid it, and therefore the spaceship WON'T get thrown back in time. This is a nice, neat little time paradox that appears to support one solitary conclusion - however, other answers are possible. Perhaps the U.S. Navy could be counted on to keep the discovery secret. Perhaps the crew of the spaceship in the future never studies U.S. history, or doesn't figure out that their spaceship was THAT spaceship that got found in the ocean several hundred years before. Or maybe they knew about the black hole so they changed their course, only to fly right into it anyway. Or maybe some future expert on time travel saw the paradox coming, so they removed certain details about the found spacecraft from the historical records.
But it seems that the curious mathematician couldn't resist the urge to check out the shiny thing, and somehow he got inside of it, or appeared to, even though there wasn't any kind of door. This is where things got very uncertain, it was difficult for me (and the characters, too) to determine what was happening after this point in the film. So far I've read four or five different interpretations, and there's no clear consensus - that's a big problem for a film, if the audience doesn't even know what's going on, I think. The big shiny sphere is some kind of reality engine? Is that right? What effect it had on the humans was also unclear, they sort of imply that because the math guy was reading "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" that somehow his unconscious mind created the giant squid? While he slept, his dreams manifested as reality? That's a big buy-in, don't you think?
What's worse is that we're told that the mathematician was the ONLY one who entered the sphere, and then they pull a switcheroo late in the film that then tells us two other people also entered the sphere, and they've been manifesting the same dreams-become-reality powers. And then this after-the-fact fact is used to explain the other weird events that took place before - their fears and dreams were manifested in reality, and for this reason somehow the habitat then needs to be destroyed. Sure, right, I follow that logic, of course. But reality is fractured by this point, and these three people can't tell their dreams apart from reality - they're on the sub, but they THINK they're on the station, or is it the other way around? How the hell can they even tell what they're doing, and if they can make their dreams happen, why don't they just IMAGINE themselves to safety? And how come nobody's dream of being in high-school in their underwear manifests itself into reality? (and please, can we make sure that happens to Sharon Stone's character, not Dustin Hoffman's. Thanks.)
I don't know, some things just can't be explained - like, for example, how did this confusing piece of nonsense get made into a film? I'm assuming that the source material, a novel by Michael Crichton, is much more coherent. What a shame that $80 million was spent making this movie (and that's in 1998 dollars) and it only brought in $37 million. They could have done so many better things in the late 1990's with $80 million, like cured a disease or something. Wouldn't the world have been better off? Instead somebody just couldn't decide if they wanted to rip off "Alien" or "The Abyss" so they tried to do both, and failed miserably. And the characters decide that they're better off forgetting about the whole encounter - if only I could do the same.
Also starring Dustin Hoffman (last seen in "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium"), Samuel L. Jackson (last heard in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Liev Schreiber (last seen in "Defiance"), Peter Coyote (last heard in "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room"), Queen Latifah (last seen in "Girls Trip"), Marga Gomez, Bernard Hocke (last seen in "The Big Short"), James Pickens Jr. (last seen in "Red Dragon"), Michael Keys Hall, Ralph Tabakin and a cameo from Huey Lewis (last seen in "Back in Time").
RATING: 4 out of 10 leaky pipes
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