Sphere-o-sphere

We’re watching Sphere (1998) partly as part of our 90s undersea horror fest (The Abyss, Deep Rising, from the same year as Sphere), but also because the chuckleheads on the We Hate Movies are doing it on a recent podcast, and I wanted to be in the loop.

It starts with a title card “The Surface”, but they are in the air. A helicopter is taking Dustin Hoffman to the middle of the ocean for reasons not discussed. He is a psychologist who often counsels survivors of air disasters, so that’s what he assumes. When he gets to the one of the many ships out in the middle of nowhere, he finds out that’s not what happened. He meets his team members: Astrophysicist Liev Schreiber, mathematician Samuel L. Jackson, and biologist Sharon Stone. It seems that the Bush administration had paid Hoffman to write up the protocol for alien contact. Figuring no one would ever need it, he kind of half-assed it, and put in some smart people he knew as the ideal team. After all, why sweat it? The team will be lead by Navy Captain Peter Coyote.

The next chapter is “The Deep”. They head to the underwater lab that is investigating the sunken spacecraft. There are several very Michael Crichton touches, describing submarine life. For instance, since they are all breathing oxy-helium, they have a scene with everyone talking like Mickey Mouse. Then Coyote tells them to put on their voice compensators and it stops. That’s what I mean by Crichton touches - some specific, well-researched technical detail, and some bullshit, made up to keep the story moving.

We get a bit more of Hoffman’s backstory - not everyone he put in the report is glad to be on this expedition, and that he had an affair with Stone that ended badly. Actually, I think it started badly too - she was both his student and his patient. When she tried to commit a little light suicide (Hoffman doesn’t think it was too serious), she did it with pills he prescribed.

Then, in “The Spacecraft”. This giant spacecraft has been at the bottom of the sea for 300 years, by the coral growth (not sure it grows that deep, but anyway), They suit up and head over to the alien vessel, and discover a lot of familiar things. Like, the ancient corpse died eating a pack of Blue Diamond almonds. It isn’t alien - it’s from the future.

But it does have an alien on board - a 20-foot floating golden sphere, with ripples. They can’t see in, and it doesn’t do anything, so they all head home to bed. Just before lights out, Jackson says, “We’re all going to die down here.” You see, the people in the future didn’t know what was going to happen on their mission. But if the team had reported it, they would have known. So - they don’t make it back alive. Then he sneaks out and gets into the sphere, by way of his reflection.

And then people start to die. First, crewmember Queen Latifah (!) is out walking underwater when she is swarmed by jellyfish. At first it’s cute, but then she starts to freak out, and they bust into her suit. Meanwhile, everyone else inside is just watching and nobody even mentions like saving her. After she’s gone, everyone kind of goes about their business. Hoffman mentions that he has kind of a jellyfish phobia. But nobody cares about Latifah. I can’t decide if this is because the characters are all self-absorbed dicks, because Crichton is a dick, or because this is supposed to represent some kind of dream-state.

Speaking of dreaming, they found Jackson under the sphere in a coma. When he wakes up, he’s happy and hungry (don’t try to feed him calamari, though), but won’t really answer questions about the sphere. Actually nobody really asks, and again, I wonder why.

We’re only about halfway through, and just getting to the meat of the story, but I’m going to skip all the rest. It does become kind of a horror movie, with some gruesome deaths. Hoffman and Stone’s personal problems get way out of hand, and so do everyone else’s. There’s some psychological and philosophical stuff that isn’t bad but maybe not great.And an ending that is acceptable but not really satisfying.

After I admit that this is a cool high-tech sci-fi adventure, with a touch of Alien but underwater, I’m going to say that I don’t think this is very good. Part of it is Hoffman’s extreme dickishness to Stone. At the end, he sort of apologizes, and it just seems to show how little he gets it. But the same problem applies to pretty much everyone - people die and no one cares. Jackson sleeps through most of it. He becomes odd and autistic, and nobody cares or seems concerned.

I really like Michael Crichton - take The 13th Warrior or a classic like Andromeda Strain. But like a lot of old-timey SF authors, he seems to have trouble imagining what people’s feeling would be like.