Warner Bros. Pictures
Michael Crichton adaptations require a certain alchemy. Some of the best movies based on his novels retain their source material’s pulpy thrills while simultaneously enriching their storytelling and clamping down on their absurdity, with 1993’s “Jurassic Park” being the gold standard, naturally. Alternatively, 1995’s “Congo” turns Crichton’s serious-as-a-heart-attack book about killer gorillas and mythic diamond mines into a whimsical sci-fi safari adventure replete with cameos from Jimmy Buffett and Bruce Campbell (on the off-chance you’re not sure what kind of movie you’re watching).
And then there’s “Sphere,” the 1998 big screen rendition of Crichton’s deep sea sci-fi thriller novel that’s unfortunately neither silly-smart nor scary-fun; it’s mostly just a soggy bore. Like Crichton’s original book, the movie follows a small group of academics and members of the Navy to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to investigate what appears to be a spacecraft from the future carrying a giant sphere from … somewhere. That premise isn’t bad, either. In typical Crichton fashion, it reads like a modern populist riff on an older genre classic; basically, “Solaris” but underwater, as /Film’s Jeremy Smith observed in his own takedown of “Sphere.” And just like that revered sci-fi drama, this particular Crichton project doesn’t wait long before shifting into darker cosmic territory, as its human heroes soon realize just how dangerously unprepared they are to interact with an extra-terrestrial object.
With that, plus a decorated cast led by Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, and Samuel L. Jackson (then only five years out from becoming a dino-snack in “Jurassic Park”), “Sphere” seemed like it could be the next hit Crichton movie adaptation. Instead, it proved to be a poorly-reviewed box office bust that almost killed the Michael Crichton brand on its own, at least so far as the Hollywood powers that be were concerned.
Sphere marked the beginning of the end for Michael Crichton adaptations
Warner Bros. Pictures
Different backdrops aside, “Sphere” and “Solaris” really do have an alarming amount in common. In both of them, the human characters gradually come to realize that their most harmful thoughts and self-destructive impulses are being literally weaponized against them by these other-worldly entities they’ve found … and it’s their own dang fault. But where “Solaris” takes the time to unpack what that says about human nature, “Sphere” mainly uses it as an excuse to deliver cheap jolts and kill off the obvious redshirts in its ensemble in oddly mean and unpleasant ways.
This is where we have to hold director Barry Levinson’s feet to the fire. He and Dustin Hoffman were hot off their celebrated 1997 (and eerily prescient) political satire “Wag the Dog” and had previously made the Best Picture Oscar-winning “Rain Man,” but Levinson just couldn’t get a bead on “Sphere.” Despite having an $80 million budget (a lot for that time), the movie isn’t visually inventive enough to make the high-tech undersea station where most of its story takes place feel like a proper haunted house where the walls are closing in, as opposed to a collection of austere, uninviting sets. Even its characters are kind of lifeless, which shouldn’t have been a problem for Levinson in his prime. (Mind you, this was long before his “Alto Knights” era.)
There was one more major Michael Crichton adaptation after that (1999’s “The 13th Warrior”), but even if that notorious flop had gone over better, the response to “Sphere” might have already doomed it. Then again, considering that Levinson had also helmed the preposterous 1994 Crichton adaptation “Disclosure” (a clown show to discuss another day), perhaps he should’ve known better than to revisit that well at all.
