at the end of sphere, the sphere leaves, whats with the sphere to begin with? i did not enjoy sphere. the cast of sphere was amazing though, so many names. but the plot? "lets board the sphere" and talk about it for a while before it departs.. suck film. while watching sphere i was wondering if a film called triangle might have worked better. at least a triangle is sharp and pointy, maybe they could try to stab each other with it. to conclude, I've seen better films. this film is probably the worst out of the last 100, or out of films I've seen this year. the version i watched was the special edition DVD version, and lets just say i wont be viewing any of the special features.

Seriously limp, big-budget dud. Want to watch five people shout at each other on the ocean floor? Anyone who claims this is intelligent science fiction is unaware that anything thoughtful in this movie was stolen from 2001 (when it's not stealing from The Shining). The unthoughtful parts (most of the movie) are the same as every other shallow blockbuster. It's second half is howlingly bad, as no one involved knows how or why to keep the balls in play once they've been tossed. Sphere has no answers for the questions it keeps asking, joining a long line of similar movies (Flatliners, Event Horizon, The Black Hole, Hellraiser etc). At the ninety minute mark, by which point any other movie has successfully involved you and is concluding, this movie still hasn't even engaged you. It's depressing to consider the thousands of people who took home very good paychecks making this movie. All those dollars didn't purchase enough thought to produce two minutes worth filming. I can only imagine that major actors were willing to sign on to a project like this because, since this brand of sci-fi has nothing to show us, it gave them major screen time to admire themselves. Half the actors can't even pronounce the word "sphere," instead going with 'spear.' Nothing will prepare you for the meaninglessness of this flop. Sphere just doesn't work.

The first 30 minutes of this movie was compelling but after that it just fell flat. With all the new technology in the ship wouldn't 5 geniuses be a little more interested in what was inside? Not to mention the Sphere itself. With something so interesting you think the director would want to titillate us a little with its powers. Did anyone else notice how emotionally detached the characters were? After every tragedy that included deaths of supposed friends, there just sitting around sipping coffee trying to figure out what happened all the while, smiling!? This really could have been a great movie, its got all the elements. The director just blew it.

The Sphere (1998) Barry Levinson is one of those directors who has no interest in art, or in invention, or in pretension, either. And so his films sometimes hit a popular strain that makes them take off. He has some terrible misfires, for sure, but his best films ("Rain Man," "Sleepers") have people who you relate to, and who have to confront something extraordinary. That was the idea here, based on a Michael Crichton novel (that should have been a heads up). The cast is headliner stuff. Dustin Hoffman is particularly convincing, Samuel Jackson plays a great type, and Liev Schreiber is sharp. Sharon Stone is a dull fourth. They bond, and realize they have things in common, in the first minutes of the film as they converge and go under water to check out an alien spaceship. Even after they are deep below the surface and beginning their unlikely exploration they make a viewer connect. As much as it borrows from "Alien" and "Aliens" this could have been a good film on its own terms. Even the talking computer/alien has its own edge compared to HAL. What goes wrong is the plot itself, and not acting, or even directing, can overcome that. As it gets hairier, we need it to be more plausible, not less. Events get increasingly chaotic, so that action and loud noise drive some of the scenes. Subplots are continued but seem increasingly meaningless (at one point, Hoffman and Stone are rushing into the water in an absolute emergency and they start to chitchat about their distant failed love affair). And finally, as people die off and the menace becomes more ambiguous, the movie becomes completely ambiguous, and as a kind of escape valve, announces that any number of crazy thing we have been watching may or may not have been imagined by one character or another. But what does that mean about the camera? Isn't there still a differentiation between cinema reality and one character's delusion? Or if these are global delusions including the viewer, shouldn't they do more than simply disorient us? Well, don't hang on for answers. Just hang on. An explosion (of course) caps it all off (why they didn't hit the disarm button isn't explained), and a final logical wrap up that avoids the time travel paradox is warm and fuzzy.

I thought I would comment on this one, because I thought it was one of the most God-awful movies to come out in 1998. It is by far the worst Michael Crichton-based movie yet. Perhaps it's because I had high hopes (the book is one of my favorites), but I cannot remember the last time I saw a movie as jarbled, disorganized, and ultimately non-interesting as this one. This is a special effects movie with no special effects. The most high-tech shots are the opening credits, for God's sake! The plot requires (spoiler warning) an underwater habitat, a gigantic submerged spaceship, a humongous alien sphere, several underwater creatures and finally a giant squid attack. All of these elements are handled with incredible incompetence. The habitat is filled entirely with grey---the navy is smart enough to put color in habitats like this, to keep people from going crazy. Nobody wants to spend much time in a place like this, especially a movie audience. The squid attack is so bad its laughable---we never see the squid! Imagine the T-Rex scene in Jurrasic Park if it began with a tree shaking and then stopped. In Sphere, we basically get a blip on the radar screen, then the camera moves around a lot. The writers try to remain faithful to the plot, but get so many critical points wrong that the whole things falls apart long before we see any squids. Its almost as if they read certain chapters of the book, then tried to guess what the rest was about. The final act, when all is explained, made perfect sense to me in the book, but in hopelessly incomprehensible in the movie. And the ending takes a *major* turn from the book---what was that about! I have no trouble when movies make intelligent changes from their inspirations, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Barry Levinson is a good director, and I'm sure he will make a better movie some day. Perhaps he should stick to comedy. Or perhaps he thought he would need to do a big-budget movie to go along with the indie hit Wag the Dog. Either way, he gets a crucial point wrong here: What made the book Sphere so compelling to read wasn't squids or jellyfish, but our fascination with the Sphere itself---Where did it come from? What is its purpose? Neither the book nor the movie answers those questions completely, but the difference is the movie never seems to care.

The book sphere, by Michael Crichton, is excellent. The movie on the other hand, falls short. The film of course, doesn't follow the book exactly, like all book-to-movies, however, it does follow pretty closely, considering. Dustin Hoffman fits into PERFECT character. He plays his character just like the book plays him. Quiet. Not very excitable. Samuel L. Jackson, was also good. However, my casting flaw would be Sharon Stone. She's horrible, not playing her character at all well. However, for some reason people don't like this movie, even despite Sharon Stone and some other flaws. I watched this before the book, so I don't like it because I read the book. I like this film before I read the book. So, I don't get why people don't like SPHERE. I mean, sure it's not great, but it's entertaining enough on a friday/saturday night to watch along with some popcorn. Give this film a break. Rent it.....I'm sure you won't be too dissapointed.

It's like a children's story. Full of illogical plot twists and the necessity for the audience to take ridiculous leaps of faith to justify what appears on the screen and the reactions of the character to the situations. There is no stimulus to think anywhere beyond the confines of the film... Other than the thought "what the heck is going on?". And in this case, that question arises for the wrong reasons. It simply fails to stay believable within the boundaries of the universe built for the story. Yes, there are suspenseful moments and some terrifying images, but even those moments are diffused by the knowledge presented in the film that 'all is not what it seems'. And this is the same story told many times before going all the way back to 'Forbidden Planet' and the 'monsters of the id'. The take-away from the movie is... your perception is your reality. And sometimes it's scary. Or is it: 'your perception is EVERYONES reality?" OMG that really make you think! ... NOT. I take offense to the reviews that suggest people who did not like this movie are intellectually challenged. If you found this movie to be stimulating to you intellectually.. may I also recommend 'The Berenstain Bear's and the Spooky Old Tree'... I'm sure that one will will have you on your toes the whole time and weeping for it's beauty at your next book club meeting. I know it's difficult to make a movie... and there was a great effort and much skill and intelligence put in to making 'Sphere'... It simply doesn't deliver on the entertainment nor intellectual fronts.

Don't bother. The writing is terrible - the characters' motives and actions make no sense whatsoever. As a viewer we are asked to accept so much incredibly bad stuff . . . yeah, it makes perfect sense that an 'alien' would communicate by mapping a keyboard onto a sphere and numbering the keys in a spiral fashion starting from the center. Perfect sense. Or that you could mistranslate 'My name is Harry' into 'My name is Jerry' but not mistranslate anything else that he was saying. Or how about the 'inevitable' conclusion that the fact nobody knows what happens in the future means that everyone died? I'd say it's a lot more likely that information of that nature would at the least be kept confidential, or (as they weakly wrapped up the plot) simply not spread beyond the surviving crew members Don't get me started on the other plot holes. What the hell happened to the dark-haired woman? Oh there's a noise outside. Huh, it's her dead body. What could have done this to her? NOBODY EVER KNOWS OR BOTHERS TO FIND OUT. And the dialogue was really awful too. 'You know me. I believe everything'. There were very few lines in this movie that sounded like a real person would ever speak them. Samuel Jackson's character was a mishmash of weirdness - he spent far too much of the movie seeming like some sort of evil agent of the sphere, when it turns out that he's just a raging idiot. Well played. What really bothers me is that underneath all this crap, is a halfway decent idea. I have not read Crighton's novel, for all I know it is tolerable or even decent. But whatever it is, this adaptation is absolutely godawful. I feel stupider for having watched it; I feel stupider for being a member of a race which has other individuals who would rate this miscarriage of filmography as anything other than utter dreck.

The psychiatrist Dr. Norman Goodman (Dustin Hoffman) travels from San Diego to the middle of nowhere in the Pacific Ocean to help survivors of a plane crash. Soon he learns that he was actually summoned by Captain Harold C. Barnes (Peter Coyote) to team-up with the biochemistry Dr. Elizabeth 'Beth' Halperin (Sharon Stone); the mathematician Dr. Harry Adams (Samuel L. Jackson); and the astrophysical Dr. Ted Fielding (Liev Schreiber) to investigate an unknown life form in a spacecraft that crashed two hundred and eighty-eight years ago. The team saturates with helium to travel to a base close to the UFO 1,000 feet below the ocean and operated by the military Alice 'Teeny' Fletcher (Queen Latifah) and Jane Edmunds (Marga Gómez). Barnes, Norman, Beth, Harry and Ted go to the spaceship and discover that it is terrestrial from the future. Further, the computer indicates an Unknown Entry Event, probably a Black Hole that brought the spaceship to the past. Harry uses logic and concludes that if the crew had never heard anything about their discovery in the present days, they will probably dies. But they all are intrigued with a mysterious sphere inside the spacecraft. There is a storm in the surface and the fleet must leave the area, leaving Barnes and his team without communication. Harry sneaks out and enters in the sphere and then his manifestations come to life threatening the group. Will they survive to the power of the mysterious sphere? I saw "Sphere" on the late 90's but I did not like it. Yesterday I saw it again, now on DVD, and this time I found it a sci-fi with an intelligent story but with a terrible direction. The greatest problem are the characters that are unpleasant, unlikable and emotionally detached and without feelings. The situation of the fleet leaving the area due to a storm but without leaving a submarine in the area to give support to the group is also a great flaw in the story. This screenplay in the hands of Spielberg or James Cameron could have been a great film. My vote is six. Title (Brazil): "Esfera" ("Sphere")

I gave it a 9 due to the fact that they didn't explain everything out for me. So often I watch movies and can easily predict everything that is going on, and how it is going to turn out. This movie is not that way. Great suspense from beginning to end, and it will leave you thinking when it is over. If the writers/producers were to tell all about the plot, the best part of the movie (not being exactly sure what is going on) would be ruined. As they talk to the ''unknown'' creature through the computer, this gives the movie a much more eerie feel. A must watch for anyone who likes movies. Rent it or buy it today.