Sphere

Director: Barry Levinson
Cast:
Dustin Hoffman
Sharon Stone
Samuel L. Jackson
Peter Coyote
Queen Latifah

Where to begin...let's just say that the first 90% of "Sphere" is absolutely incredible. Brought to a remote ocean outpost by a secret military operation, psychologist Dustin Hoffman finds that he has been called in as a special team of "alien contact" supervisors. Which, of course, includes deep-sea biologist Sharon Stone, math genius Samuel L. Jackson and astrophysicist Liev Schreiber. None of whom, of course, know the true reason for their visit: a spaceship half-mile in length seems to have crashed into the Pacific in the early 1700's. And better yet, there's a low-level life force lurking in it.

Director Barry Levinson gets a real surreal vibe going from the first plunge; it's "The Shining" under water. There is the unsettling sense that our main characters can't ever tell fact from fiction under this much water; they never quite seem comfortable in their own tender skins. For a while, the tightrope act works, and the audience is right there, miles underwater and terrified. All of us waiting for the payoff that will explain everything in a glorious denouement from the genius mind of Michael Crichton.

Then, literally, the bottom falls out. The movie ends. Every single question you have, every one, is left unexplained. Where did the sphere come from? Why do the main characters seem to enjoy watching each other suffer? What was with all the time travel stuff? I mean, you can't even BEGIN to start asking questions, because you won't know where to stop. And everything that was cool in the beginning of the movie just seems like lazy filmmaking and even lazier scriptwriting. My vote for the Most Reprehensible, Irresponsible Film of the Year, "Sphere" is a mind-blowingly vacant exercise in futility.

—Ian Williams

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