Sphere (1998)

The year is 1998, and Warner Bros. has spent somewhere between seventy-three and eighty million dollars on a Michael Crichton adaptation in which a team of scientists descends to the Pacific floor, finds a spacecraft that should not be there, and then finds a sphere inside it. Barry Levinson directs. Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone and Samuel L. Jackson star. The film opened third, earned tepid notices, and closed its theatrical run as a write-down. It is a genre exercise from a decade that had not yet been asked to explain itself.

The ensemble is more textured than the material deserves. Samuel L. Jackson, Queen Latifah, Marga Gómez and James Pickens Jr. appear as working professionals whose presence is never framed as a statement. This is colorblind casting in the 1990s manner, incidental and unremarked. Sharon Stone plays a marine biologist of evident competence, and the film never converts that competence into an argument about anything. No racial themes surface. No LGBTQ content, no ecological warning, no contempt for corporations, no discourse on bodies or brains. The psychologist is a job title, not a diagnosis.

The film does have talk, and plenty of it. The sphere is probed, described, theorized, and explained by men and women standing in a wet room. This is exposition as load-bearing architecture, and it holds up nothing. Roger Ebert observed that the screenplay uses lots of talk to conceal the fact that the story has never been grappled with, which remains a fair verdict. The result is an A-level cast delivering B-grade material, culturally inert and apparently content to stay that way. The sphere, for its part, floats off into space at the end, unbothered.