Sphere

My parents had a dinner party last night, which I tried mightily to get out of by going to a concert. This concert-going attempt ended up being one of the major fiascoes of my young life, featuring bad directions, prostitutes, and extreme confusion about the method and placement of one-way streets. Let us put this out of our minds. Anyway, I went home briefly before going to see the above-mentioned movie and saw my mom and one of the two people at the dinner party I knew. When I mentioned my plan to get the hell out of their way, Jae (my mom's friend) advanced that people who review movies for newspapers don't act like they enjoy any movies at all as a matter of policy. Then if they aren't commercially successful they look good; and if they are commercially successful, well, the subsequent references to the movie get more and more positive. About three hours later, I had opportunity to reflect on this, having been taken in, scared excrementless and wrung out by a movie which was dismissively reviewed by everyone in my hometown. This is not a fluke, BTW, as my sister saw "Sphere" with friends elsewhere and was similarly scared.

My personal hypothesis is this: Barry Levinson, who directed this movie, also directed "Wag the Dog," which was also dismissively reviewed by my hometown reviewers. "Wag the Dog" now occupies the historically unique position of having overtaken events within a month of its release, as Clinton faces a dilemma similar to that of the fictional president of that movie, who gropes a Girl Scout-type person and starts a fictional war in Albania to divert attention. Now, as Saddam proclaims to the world, "Don't call it a comeback/I've been here for years," and Clinton is harried by allegations which, although not videotaped like the events in "WTD," are widely believed by enough of the Washington elite that they might as well be, the Pentagon talks of the "Wag the Dog scenario." So movie reviewers look pretty stupid, as one of the comments most often made was about the "simplicity" of the movie, and they are on record. Now Barry Levinson has released another movie while his first movie is still out. Movie reviewers were made to look stupid the first time, and, like Arnold, they're out for revenge. "After all," they're saying, "there's no way this could possibly happen!"

Of course, that's what they said last time.

In any case, this movie is unimpeachable if you're just watching it and not defending your honor. This is by far the best Crichton screen adaptation I've seen, including the excrescene "Congo" and both "Jurassic Park"s, which were possibly the most overrated movies in history by the box office. The only problem is those damn segment titles: little white-text-on-black-background things like "Analysis," "Battle Stations," and "The Monster." Unnecessary in the extreme; it's like Shakespeare were to project scene titles during Hamlet that said "The Ghost Appears," "Ophelia's Mad Scene," and "The Final Showdown." Sharon Stone is not asked to play a whore and does OK, but Dustin Hoffman and Samuel L. Jackson outdo themselves, Hoffman as every psychologist story you've ever heard (the way he lapses into therapist-speak with the alien at every conceivable opportunity, including while the underwater station is under attack, is hilariously appropriate), and Jackson as a piercingly intelligent, good-natured mathematician.

Part of my reaction to Jackson's performance, I am sure, was an irrational reaction to not hearing him say "motherfucker" or make racial threats for a whole movie, but a whole lot more of my irrational reaction was probably due to the fact that he ID'd Mozart's Horn Concerto K. 447 in exactly the same annoying way I do whenever someone is playing classical and I'm with friends. Now I'm as cool as Samuel L. Jackson! Or Jackson is as cool as me, a prospect which I have to, under careful consideration, forget about entirely. He'll come back from it, if it's true. Queen Latifah also makes an appearance, getting offed, and everyone else is believable.

But probably the thing I liked most about this movie was the way it celebrated intelligence, instead of stupid bull-rush action. I will defend stupid bull-rush action until I die, but am unvarying diet of it gets fattening, like only eating beef. This movie was more like fiery Thai marinated chicken in that respect: lean, light, powerful, gets in and out quickly and makes an impact. There was actual interesting analysis of events as they were going on by the principals (all of them); theories from the current literature are tossed around; two characters play poker about how early they got their first PhD's. No one goes in and tries to kill the thing without knowing what they are going to do. Schwartzenegger it's not, but interesting—and extremely scary—it is.

Believability: I think I had better define what I am looking for in this category. It's not so much the likelihood of the events, but the consistency the movie has in working within the events as delineated. For example, to watch "Starship Troopers" one has to accept that there are these huge malevolent alien bugs on distant planets which we can somehow reach. When working within this conceit, though, one does not have to suppose (as my friend Mike [Sapoznikow] rightly pointed out to me) that we will engage in WWI-esque storming the beaches with small arms against an enemy whose planets we have absolutely no interest in preserving. We could have nuked them out of existence with remote-guided weapons.

"Sphere" works within its events.

Tension: Lord yes. It starts high and only goes up, to the point where the end is actually a relief because the story is over and not because the movie is over, if you get my drift.

Action: Believable when needed. More a psychological-tension movie than a true action movie though.

Attractive Man Count: Jackson, certainly, and that's about it in my book. 1.

Attractive Woman Count: No one in this movie is asked explicitly to be attractive, even Sharon Stone, and that makes me more open to granting her a 1.

Overall Grade: A-. I'm not a pro, but at least I have the "Sphere"s to tell it like it was.

BTW, Robert Kahn informed me later that the titles were the chapter titles from Crichton's novel, which explains what they are without explaining why Levinson included them.

You can kind of see how this type of review, what with its narrative dependence on my Baltimorean prostitute story, would not really work in a newspaper.

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