Dustin Hoffman And Sharon Stone Starred In An Overlooked Michael Crichton Movie

There was a time when you couldn't watch cable television without bumping into Barry Levinson's 1998 sci-fi mystery, "Sphere". As a result, I've seen the movie (which is based on Michael Crichton's 1987 novel of the same name) multiple times, and always felt that something just wasn't clicking about the story that the prestigious cast (including Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, Samuel L. Jackson, and Liev Schreiber) and decent production design were trying to mask all along.

At the time, my young and impressionable brain was hardly versed in science fiction, so despite its narrative and visual flaws, I found "Sphere" titillating and thought-provoking until its famously divisive and nonsensical ending. But it was not until years later that I learned about how big a commercial and critical failure Levinson's feature actually was.

At the box office, "Sphere" couldn't even make its budget back, peaking at around $70 million worldwide against an estimated $80-100 million production cost. Critics vehemently picked it apart for being derivative, sluggish, and preposterously unimaginative. The late Roger Ebert said it felt rushed, adding "The only excellence is in the acting, and even then the screenplay puts the characters through so many U-turns that dramatic momentum is impossible." I mostly agree with that, though I believe the mystery at the film's center and the questions it raises deserve a little more credit.

In retrospect, I realize now that "Sphere" was essentially trying to be a mix of "Solaris" and James Cameron's still-breathtaking "The Abyss" with a much messier screenplay and a lot of philosophizing. The plot follows a Navy dive team sent to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to observe and study a recently discovered spacecraft believed to contain alien life and to have been there for 300 years. Marine biologist, Dr. Beth Halperin, (Stone), psychologist Dr. Norman Goodman (Hoffman), mathematician Dr. Harry Adams (Jackson), astrophysicist, Dr. Ted Fielding (Schreiber), and U.S. Navy Captain Harold Barnes (Peter Coyote) soon realize, however, that the orb they've found in the spacecraft is capable of manifesting their deepest fears to put them in fatal situations while also potentially driving them insane.

Logically, "Sphere" might not make much sense once its underwhelming ending is revealed, but up until that point, the mystery at its core gives the film the kind of suspense that draws viewers in and keeps their attention. Given the amount of talent gathered here, the movie often feels compelling enough to keep us intrigued about where all this is going and who'll actually survive the journey after coming into contact with the mysterious orb. In that aspect, "Sphere" is likely more overlooked than it deserves to be, but at the same time, there's an understandable reason it shifted out of the public consciousness without becoming a cult classic in a way that other, better '90s sci-fi movies (like "Event Horizon") have done so.