Sphere (1998)

Derided on its release twenty-five years ago, Barry Levinson's adaptation of Michael Crichton's novel is certainly not without flaws, nor is there an absence of bankable stars on display, with Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone and Samuel L. Jackson all playing major roles in the unfurling drama. Crichton's novels are often ripe for cinematic outings, and we've certainly not been deprived over the years, although there's no doubting there's not many that are remembered with fondness. Undisputedly the finest is Jurassic Park (1993), although Spielberg's follow up The Lost World (1997) makes a decent fist of recreating its source material. Often forgotten is Disclosure (1994), which Levinson himself adapted, and is a fine piece of work pulling terrific performances from Michael Douglas and Demi Moore. In this respect, Levinson was the perfect man to take on this tale, surrounding a group of experts that are sent to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to examine what appears to be an extra-terrestrial spacecraft, lying dormant at the bottom of the ocean for three hundred years. Once they've examined the craft, they realise it's actually American, with technology that far surpasses that of the present, and one room in the craft is housing an enormous (and seemingly living) sphere. The film isn't subtle about its similarities to Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) and the opening forty minutes or so play out very similarly to Scott's film, but Sphere comes into its own once the sphere itself starts to impose itself on the characters. There's plenty of surface-based existentialism and morality conundrums that do a fairly decent job of keeping you interested, and although Sphere admittedly shouldn't be mentioned in the same sentence as Alien (and indeed isn't even Levinson's best Crichton adaptation) it's far from the disaster that the majority of critics still claim it is.

6.0/10