SPHERE

Not so Deep

Though I usually like Michael Chrichton's books, this one stopped working for me halfway through, and really took a turn for the worse toward the end - when I figured out he'd cribbed the idea from Forbidden Planet and moved it to the bottom of the sea. The movie version fares a little better, mainly due to interesting performances by the all star cast.  

Dustin Hoffman plays a psychologist who picked up a quick paycheck from the government ten years ago by writing a paper with his recommendations for a team of experts to make first contact with extraterrestrial. Much to his surprise, he now finds himself heading to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean as part of such a team, along with biochemist Sharon Stone, mathematician Samuel L. Jackson, and physicist Liev Schreiber. Peter Coyote is the military head of the operation, setting up shop in a base built next to a huge spaceship buried on the ocean floor. Outside these five there's only Queen Latifah and a few other likely victims in the cast.  

The team enters the spaceship and finds (1) that it's an Earth ship from the future that crash landed 300 years in the past via a black hole, and (2) a big shiny golden sphere. At some point one or more cast members get inside the Sphere, people start acting weird and paranoid, and sea monsters attack the base. In between monster attacks, our heroes form a little encounter group, trying to figure out what the hell is going on and who is trying to stab who in the back. The psychobabble doesn't pay off with a rousing finish, either - those who thought the ending to Contact was lame will be outraged at the end of this one.  

None of this is as much fun as any of the other deep sea thrillers of the past decade. This is the first time director Barry Levinson has tried his hand at science fiction or horror themes, and he shows no talent for either. He does manage to create a disorienting dreamlike quality at times, but this is difficult to keep interesting and leads to boredom. Instead of being riveted by an exciting situation, I'd be thinking how cool it is for Hoffman, Stone and Jackson to be doing scenes together.  

Spaceship; deep sea tech stuff; gruesome corpses; golden globe from the end of the universe; ESP; swarm of killer jellyfish; offscreen monster squid.

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