Sphere – A really bad movie.

Just like I review great movies, I’m going to start reviewing really bad movies as well. Not just to bash them, but because some movies are just insults to an audience. For example, Troll 2 is not a bad movie – it is a good movie. It never tries to be really good and doesn’t destroy source material. Really bad movies abuse an audience, destroy source material, and sell out to stupidity.

Background:

Okay, Sphere is has a great premise and fantastic source material. Back when Michael Crichton was still relevant (and alive) he was the source of some of the better popular science-fiction around. Sphere is a damn good book and was made into a damn terrible movie. It is really easy to see why: It was adapted very poorly. I’ll get to that in second….

What it is about:

What a great premise. A psychologist, Norman, is assigned to a team of specialists with the task of exploring an underwater spaceship. Sweet. It gets better too….they investigate the ship and find that it is actually American and from the past! Holy shit! And the coolest thing? There is a fucking sphere the size of house inside the spaceship. So how did a spaceship, from the past, get a thousand feet underwater? In the book, the secrets of the story are revealed slowly and with narrative ease. In the film, it is fucking clunky, rushed, and stupid.

Why it is a really bad movie:

So what went wrong? The short anwser is: Really not much. It is a visually impressive movie – it got that part right. It has a wonderful cast, even though Samuel L. Jackson doesn’t really come off as a thirty-year-old, mathematical, logician prodigy. The musical composition is also pretty decent and actually makes the movie kinda’ creepy right off the bat.

So, again, what went wrong? Let’s talk about exposition. Exposition is a narrative tool that storytellers use to let the audience know information. For example, Norman is the main character in Sphere, but is specifically made a psychologist so scientific theories can be explained to him. Therefore, it can be explained to the audience. This is how novelists work. Michael Crichton is not great at this, but he gets it done. Barry Levinson, Sphere‘s director, makes exposition laughable.

Everyone, I mean everyone, talks in exposition. There is never a moment when something isn’t being explained, transparently I might add, to the audience. This comes from the screenwriter’s inability to adapt a work from a rich novel. Telling a story in a film and in a novel’s narrative are very, very different.  A writer has to find ways to give information without sounding like its just the writer talking to the audience. Think in Bond films, exposition is done by the “Evil Boss” telling Bond the whole plan just before he kills him. This was invented for these cheesy, yet great, movies.

Sphere’s is just ridiculous. At one point the character Barnes is discussing the interior of the ship and mentions that he was an aeronautical engineer and then everyone else talks about their background educations as well. This might sound logical on paper, but when said out loud it is ridiculous and clunky. All this exposition talk might sound unimportant, but it renders the movie broken. The movie never attempts to hide its secrets either. When creatures are attacking the ship it has a close-up of Harry and his Thousand Leagues book. I just picture an audience member in the theater leaning over to the person next to them and saying, “Oh, I bet he’s the one causing those monsters”. Clap. Clap.

Also bizarre is the addition of a huge tensions between Beth and Norman. I’m sure this was another writer’s mistake. They were probably saying, “How are we going to make a story filled with fairly sophisticated sci-fi rhetoric interesting to a the common public?” Well, throw in some tension between the main characters! Beth’s character is degraded into a mentally unstable cunt. What a shame.

Lastly, the science of the movie is important. It is explained a little clunky in the book, remember Norman is not a scientist. However, in the film, it isn’t explained at all. In the novel there is a whole section where space-time is explained and how the ship could, in theory, move through a black hole. The movie has many scientific explanations and theories that are never explored. A fundamental part of what makes the novel so fun is it attempts to legitimize itself with real science. That’s actually what made Michael Crightcon, and all his works, so fun.

Collin says: D-