At The Bottom Of The Sea

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

What in the world is Barry Levinson, the gritty realist of Diner and Tin Men, doing down, down, down at the bottom of the sea?

Well, as he was in the delicious Wag the Dog, the director is looking for a new venue in which to display the thing he loves best--rough, funny dialogue that reveals the morally equivocal motives of highly dubious dreamers. And for a few minutes at the beginning of Sphere, which is about the exploration of a spacecraft that has been discovered resting on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, you think he may be on to something.

For the scientific team assembled by writers Stephen Hauser and Paul Attanasio, adapting an old Michael Crichton novel, is ragtag and cranky. The chief credential of its psychologist (Dustin Hoffman) is a report on how to handle alien encounters, which he admits cribbing largely from sci-fi tales. The biochemist (Sharon Stone) is a pill popper. The mathematician (Samuel L. Jackson) is a cynic, the astrophysicist (Liev Schreiber) is twittily lusting after a Nobel Prize, and the team leader (Peter Coyote) needs to try a little tenderness. In short, the possibilities for amusing dysfunction are potentially larger than we usually find in movies of this kind.

Then, alas, they all head for a submerged "habitat" on the ocean floor, yank on their wet suits and start poking around the wreck. And the standard scare scenes start occurring on a more or less predictable schedule--leaks, explosions, monsters popping out of the dark depths--with a more or less predictable effect on the health, mental and physical, of the intruders, not to mention the quality of the dialogue, which deteriorates largely to murmured suspicions and warning shouts.

The problem turns out to be the eponymous sphere the space capsule carries. It's hard and shiny and has a mysterious power to ferret out, and then manifest, the worst fears of those who fall under its spell. If you have, say, a special aversion to sea snakes, then by golly, they're going to start hurling themselves at your face mask.

The question of the sphere's origin is left unanswered at the end of the film--along with a lot of other loose ends--but it's really no mystery. It probably came from the Forbidden Planet, a realm first explored in the classic 1956 sci-fi adventure movie. Its inhabitants had mastered the technique of invading people's minds, prying their darkest passions out of them and turning them back on their victims. Obviously Hoffman's character isn't the only figure involved with Sphere who has a good memory for the classic tropes of dystopian sci-fi.

But that's all right. We're in the realm of homage here, not plagiarism. What's not so good is the failure to make something arresting out of the way the dark side and the bright side of our minds interact. Movies like Forbidden Planet, which had neither the technical sophistication nor the skilled actors available to Levinson, worked their metaphors with a sort of leisurely literateness. Here, all meaning is simply lost in the hubbub, drowned out by the modern imperative to deliver a rush of action, however incomprehensible, every few minutes.

--By Richard Schickel