Why Isn't Sphere as Good as Jurassic Park?

Sphere. Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

To truly understand the 1998 movie adaptation of Michael Crichton’s best-selling underwater sci-fi thriller Sphere, we have to take ourselves back in time. The 90s was Michael Crichton’s decade. He was churning out best sellers, which were being adapted into films that broke all sorts of box office records. And, somewhere in the middle of all that, he found the time to create the number one rated television show, E.R. I was such a little aspiring nerd back then that I considered Michael Crichton to be my hero. He died on the same day that Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election. The mysteries of life.

And Sphere is all about the mysteries of life. And the mysteries of filmmaking. Specifically the mystery of why it’s possible to adapt one best selling sci-fi book into one of the greatest and most profitable films of all time, and then to apply the exact same formula to another best-selling sci-fi book by the same author and have it come up flatter than a non-spherical object, such as a pancake. In short, why isn’t Sphere as good as Jurassic Park?

I will concede, it’s a bit of an unfair question. Sphere is not actively bad; it’s just OK. I think the disappointment stems from the fact that with the budget, cast and source material it was working with we expected much more and it delivered a merely middling product. And of course to compare any film to Jurassic Park sets an impossibly high bar. But I think the main reason the two films diverged on their paths comes down to who wrote and directed each one.

Michael Crichton wrote the original adapted screenplay for Jurassic Park, which was later reworked and rewritten. But he was apparently pretty actively involved. By contrast, he received no screenwriting credit on Sphere. And of course the choice of director is pretty important. Steven Spielberg is one of the all-time great spectacle-makers of our times. He just intuitively understands what makes a good compelling blockbuster. Barry Levinson, who directed Sphere, is more cerebral. He makes more character driven, and less spectacular, films like Rain Man and Good Morning Vietnam. He’s not a bad director. But he might not have been the right director for this film.

The genius of Jurassic Park is that just like Crichton’s book it seamlessly combined heady philosophical questions about the use and misuse of technology with great story-telling. Spielberg elevated it even further with cutting edge CGI and exhilarating images of dinosaurs biting people in half while they sat on toilets. Levinson never figured out how to strike that balance in Sphere. And the source material is more difficult, to be fair. Instead of the wonder of an island filled with extinct, dangerous dinosaurs you have a mysterious sphere that deals in something that is devilishly hard to render cinematically - the human mind.

Still, there were a lot of places where it seemed like Sphere missed opportunities. It rushed through some of the most interesting bits - exploring the space ship, learning about how old it was, the philosophical questions this discovery posed - and spent perhaps too much time on water eels. When the audience learns, almost as an after-thought, that everyone has already been inside of the sphere without realizing it, it feels like a cheat, or bad pacing, or bad editing or some combination. In the end, it felt like it was going through the motions but didn’t maximize the full potential of the material.

There was so much more to be explored there, especially in regards to the inability of humanity to understand an alien being, the theme that made Solaris a classic. And while it would have been a bit of a challenge to dig into that in a visually spectacular way, it’s certainly possible. It seemed to me like all of these things were under-developed and the film wanted to focus more on the psychological or character-driven elements as is Levinson’s forte. In splitting the difference, it came up short everywhere.

Watching it, I was quite perplexed that Sphere was made several years after Jurassic Park, and yet the effects looked far less impressive. The underwater setting might have had something to do with it, but if that’s the case case it merely strengthens the argument that Levinson was not the director best suited to shoot this flick. Even though it aped Jurassic Park’s formula to the letter - by adapting Michael Crichton’s bestseller with a high degree of fidelity and packing the movie with stars - Sphere has largely been forgotten. Given the way the film (and the book) end, that seems somehow fitting.