Sphere (1998)

Boring. No suspense. The plot is ridiculous.
This movie is boring. There's no suspense or action. The plot is ridiculous. The special effects are not insteresting.

Save your money on this one.

Good except for the ending **SPOILER**
You will like this movie if you enjoy watching movies where the plot revolves around technology, the ocean and, of course, underwater scenes. The CGI effects are very good. Most noteable is a scene where hundreds of jelly fish surround and kill a diver. The plot in this movie centers around the 3 main characters going undersea to investigate a spaceship that was found sitting on the ocean floor. Within the spaceship, they find a giant gold ball which seems to affect them by making their dreams come true. Unfortuately, instead of dreaming about world peace, they only dream about scary things like snakes or wild jelly fish. So in the end, the 3 make their way to the surface of the ocean and are sitting in a room on the recovery ship, waiting to be interviewed by the military about what they had found. The 3 decide they don't want to tell the military about this "power" they have of making dreams come true so they agree they will just "forget about it". The 3 join hands and on the count of 1, 2, 3 they forget about it. Next, the ball rises up from the ocean floor and soars up and out into space. It's gone. They wished it away. The End. Yes---that's how it ends.

Oscillating between too many models
We can recognize the various models that are at work in this film and we are amazed how strong they can be. Aliens of course, but at the bottom of some ocean abyss and some spacecraft that got buried deep down there and that can only liberate itself with the psychic energy of some humans who it attracts into a sphere and then suck up dry: it feeds and regenerates on the fears of three human beings that it has been able to invite inside that living sphere. Stephen King's Tommyknockers are not very far. And the black hole in the cosmos, the force that takes over the computers and machine of the submarine of course recalls the Space Odyssey to our minds. And the deep sea abyss, the monstrous octopus, the submarines ring many bells that summon Jules Verne in a nearly obsessive way. But there is something missing in this complex fabric. It is too contradictory to be satisfactory. How come this force that can only liberate itself from its wrecked position will use the three people it manages to invade to destroy all the others and then one another? That living sphere can only take off if these three human beings join their minds to erase their memory of what happened and donate their mental power to the sphere. If they succeeded in destroying one another the sphere would be trapped forever. So why manipulate them into that kind of an ending that liberates the sphere for sure but that is absurd like some kind of divine power that comes like a streak of out of place absurdity? What's more the woman of the trio has been manipulated into setting so powerful a bomb that everything will get destroyed miles away and around, including of course the three humans trapped down under the water. All that is illogical too. It is not enough to say that this poor being, but is it a being, has been trapped under the water for three centuries to explain these discrepancies. A better job could have been devised more in the line of Jules Verne or Stephen King or Kubrick, but probably not the three without counting the aliens and their eggs. That makes things slightly too labyrinthine and sibylline, enigmatic and mysterious and it destroys the utter pleasure we expect: to be confronted to something inescapable, something so logical that it takes a stronger, hence human logic to defeat it, and yet only for some kind of short resting interlude. The defeat and victory of that sphere, if that cosmic calamity comes literally by accident, haphazardly.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines