‘Sphere’ lacks thrills that thrillers require> Levinson fails to establish realistic characters

“Sphere.” Directed by Barry Levinson. Based on the novel by Michael Crichton, written for the screen by Stephan Hauser and Paul Attanasio. Running time: 132 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for mild language and violence).

Toward the end of Barry Levinson’s unfortunate film adaptation of Michael Crichton’s 1987 best-selling novel, “Sphere,” three of the film’s principal actors — Dustin Hoffman, Samuel L. Jackson and Sharon Stone — gather in a circle, hold hands and agree to forget all that has taken place in the past two hours.

They actually do this. No one in their respective entourages stopped them. They close their eyes and vow to forget it all.

At that moment, this critic — whose insomnia was cured midway through the film — leaned forward and began looking around the theater, which now resembled something close to a morgue: In the dim, flickering bluish light fanning above the crowd, several could be seen with their heads lolling back, their mouths yawning open, suggesting that some in this audience had already formed their own secret circle, choosing to forget this film entirely.

Lucky them.

“Sphere” is the clumsy, slow-moving and unsatisfying story of an extraterrestrial spacecraft found deep beneath the Pacific Ocean. Covered with 300 years’ worth of coral, the ship still emits a distant hum — suggesting that it is intact and that life might still exist on board. When a scientific team of four — Hoffman as psychologist Norman Goodman, Jackson as mathematician Harry Adams, Stone as biochemist Beth Halperin and Liev Schreiber as astrophysicist Ted Fielding — is called in by the government to investigate, the film wastes no time in getting them to the bottom of the ocean and aboard that ship, where filmgoers expect great suspense and action to be lurking at every corner.

It’s not.

Indeed, in spite of the huge, intoxicating golden sphere the team finds undulating on board the spacecraft, the horrific potential in that sphere is never fully realized because director Levinson is too timid, too hurried or too dense to explore what it truly means. So lost in — or so enamored by — the film’s mindless psychobabble, he forgets that this film was supposed to be a thriller, which it clearly isn’t.

His characters get even less development. He presents a team of scientists we know nothing about, and thus care nothing for, which robs the film of any dramatic tension when they are put in harm’s way. As for Levinson’s sets, they prove to be the cheap sort of fare we’d see in a bad television movie starring Meredith Baxter or — worse — Tori Spelling. The writing is no better.

But what is so disturbing about “Sphere” is that Levinson, whose previous films include “Rain Man,” “Disclosure” and “Wag the Dog,” has stolen brazenly and repeatedly from other films in a failed effort to make this one work. The film’s premise is ripped straight from Stanislaw Lem’s science-fiction classic “Solaris,” the scene in which the actors plunge into the abyss was handled with greater suspense and verve in James Cameron’s “The Abyss,” and the ship’s talking computer is nothing more than a dull, humorless rip-off of HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

For a film that spends so much time beneath the ocean depths, “Sphere” certainly goes out of its way to prove itself a film of little depth. Grade: D

Video of the Week

“Air Force One.” Directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Written by Andrew Marlowe. Running time: 118 minutes. Rated R (for language and violence).

There’s a reason why “Air Force One” was one of last summer’s biggest blockbusters. Unlike John Woo’s aberrant “Face/Off,” which is this critic’s unofficial Monica Lewinsky of thrillers (so bad, it brings you to your knees), Wolfgang Petersen’s “Air Force One” has an engaging script, some genuinely gripping scenes and well-acted performances by two of Hollywood’s leading heavyweights: Harrison Ford as the president of the United States and Glenn Close as his vice president.

When Air Force One is taken hostage by a group of terrorists led by Ivan Korshunov (Gary Oldman), the president, played with bravado by Ford, is thought to have escaped through a special escape pod. He hasn’t. Hiding on board, Ford finds himself fighting to keep himself, his family and his country safe. A Vietnam veteran, he proves himself a formidable opponent to Oldman’s equally formidable terrorist, who relishes killing off hostages in an effort to get what he really wants: the release from prison of Gen. Radek (Jurgen Prochnow), a powerful man who will threaten a Communist return to Russia if he is set free.

Who has the power to free Radek? The president, of course. And what a great time we have in watching the war between terrorist and president play out.

Grade: B+

Christopher Smith, a writer and critic who lives in Brewer, reviews films each Monday in the NEWS.