What Went Wrong: Sphere
By Shalimar Sahota
December 19, 2013
BoxOfficeProphets.com
“Killer jellyfish, squid, sea snakes, and an alien being in the form of a giant totemic golden ball? Please.” This is Samuel L. Jackson’s character Harry in Sphere, explaining why no one is going to believe them when it comes to what really happened when trying to make contact with an alien lifeform. It’s a line that some viewers are welcome to help themselves to when it comes to summing up just how crazy Sphere is.
Based on the novel of the same name by Michael Crichton, the US navy discovers what appears to be an alien spacecraft at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and they think there’s an unknown lifeform in there. Navy Captain Harold Barnes (Peter Coyote) is in charge of investigating the craft and assembles a contact team, psychologist Dr. Norman Goodman (Dustin Hoffman), biochemist Dr. Beth Halperin (Sharon Stone), mathematician Dr. Harry Adams (Samuel L. Jackson) and astrophysicist Dr. Ted Fielding (Liev Schreiber), believing them to be the best of their respective fields. So they go down there, they make it into the spacecraft, and they find what appears to be the lifeform - a large golden sphere. Then things get very weird. Cue killer jellyfish, a “possible” humongous squid and conversing with an alien that calls itself Jerry.
Director Barry Levinson had been looking to direct a sci-fi film and felt that he had found it after reading Sphere. “The central concept of the book is what makes it so intriguing to me,” said Levinson. “With all of its exciting science-fiction elements, at some point it truly becomes a story of interplay between a small group of people, and how they manifest their typically human flaws -- mistrust, jealousy, envy, paranoia -- in ways that are startling and disturbing.” The film was set up at Warner Bros. with Levinson assembling a great cast. The screenplay was written by Stephen Hauser and Paul Attanasio. Michael Crichton also happened to be onboard as one of the producers, and from his point of view the film probably all made sense, but for a mainstream audience it turned out to be highly confusing.
Before its release, Warner Bros. put out an absolutely brilliant trailer. It built up plenty of mystery, cleverly letting viewers know that the characters do make contact (it would be pretty boring if they didn’t) while still holding back on what happens to them. The posters emphasised the main cast with their floating heads taking up about half of the space, but still managed to convey a sense of mystery.
There are numerous reports on the production budget for Sphere, though it is believed to have cost somewhere between $73 million – $80 million. At the time it was Levinson’s most expensive film. Sphere opened in the US on February 13, 1998. Titanic was still dominating the box office at this time. Sphere landed at #3 with an opening weekend take of $14.4 million. Spending just three weeks inside the top 10, it earned $37 million during its run at the US box office. Earning $33 million overseas, it achieved a total worldwide gross of $70 million.
By the time Sphere had reached movie theaters, Crichton’s novel had sold over four million copies. Most of that built in audience probably didn’t turn up to the film after it suffered very negative reviews, with many critics labelling it “disappointing.” The critics also made comparisons to The Abyss, Forbidden Planet, The Thing and Alien, because those films are considered the best of sci-fi, whereas Sphere sits in a corner by itself saying, “Why does nobody love me?” Some critics were also upset at the conclusion, where the surviving characters voluntarily make the decision to forget what happened.
Of course, any adaptation is going to have differences, though critics that had read the book found the film to be largely faithful. One could argue that maybe the fault lies with the source material itself; yet, given the weirdness of the story, with its fill of science, tense moments and a fear of the unknown, Sphere is probably better digested as a book rather than a film. Working on the notion that what you don’t see is far more frightening, it also poses a lot of questions, touching on ideas about time travel, dreams of an alien life and fears manifesting themselves. But the film doesn’t really fully explore them. By the time the characters have figured out what’s going on they want to leave.
The “big” mystery itself is shown more than it is explained, since, interestingly, while the characters seem to have figured it out, they aren’t entirely sure what they’re dealing with. And if the characters in the film aren’t completely sure, then the audience is just as much in the dark. This leaves parts of the film open for interpretation. Cool for the small group of people that like to have a headache discussing it, but a confusing mess for everyone else.
The DVD features an audio commentary with Dustin Hoffman and Samuel L. Jackson. At one point Hoffman explains how Sphere didn’t really meet audiences’ expectations from the genres offered. “If they look at this film and they say, ‘Well, this is a horror film, or it’s a science fiction film, or it’s a little of both,’ then they kind of want it to satisfy on that level,” said Hoffman. “Well there isn’t that much science fiction in it. A lot of it is intellectual. On a horror level, I’m not sure it’s that frightening. I think it’s intense, a lot of it, and tense, but I don’t know if it competes on a level where everybody collectively, an audience screams ‘bloody murder’ and comes three feet out of their seat, which is what audiences want. That’s the striptease of that genre...ultimately an audience wants to have the bejesus scared out of them.”
The film ends with the surviving characters making the decision to forget the powers that they have been given by the sphere. An early draft of the script had a slightly different ending. Hoffman explained that the original ending they had shot involved Norman, Beth and Harry in the decompression chamber, sitting and talking about what had happened. “When they saw it they felt it should be elongated. It wasn’t long enough,” said Hoffman, assuming “they” to be some people in charge at Warner Bros. “When we went back to reshoot it, it was written, like, three times as long. Then we improvised within that and it made it six times as long. When I saw it I had wished that we had left more stuff in there that we had shot. But by that time we were so rushed and we had such a deadline and [Barry] had to hand the picture in to the studio that he was unable to play with it as he wanted to. There just wasn’t the time. They had a release date and they couldn’t move it. We still would have liked to have worked on it.”
Speaking of the conclusion, and who was manifesting what, Jackson said, “In terms of continuity, I think the only person that really knew what was going on and how it was happening, was Barry. Because by the time we get to that ‘Push the button, Norman’ sequence I was thoroughly confused about what we were doing and why we were doing it. But that was just me; I’m not sure that Dustin or Sharon were as confused.” Jackson also said that he preferred the way the book ended. “Actually I think we shot the particular ending I liked in the original shoot, where Dustin and I forget, but you look at Sharon and you’re not quite sure she does.”
I was actually sold on Sphere after watching the trailer, generally intrigued by the whole mystery of it. Strangely, the film was not showing locally so I didn’t get to view it till it was released on video. I found it to be distinctly average. The novel may have had a head start, but the film feels as if it’s taking inspiration from the best of sci-fi only for the end result to come off as less than the sum of its parts. Hoffman believed that more time could have crafted a better film. The great build up is let down by the lack of any real pay-off. The conclusion of choosing to forget is akin to the clichéd waking up from a bad dream, only it’s worse because the characters voluntarily decide to forget. So instead of a great mysterious twist resulting in momentous word-of-mouth, once Sphere was all over, most people probably thought to themselves, “What the hell was that?” A spin-off film focusing on the inhabitants of the spacecraft, their picking up the sphere and what ultimately happened to them would have been a little more interesting.