M O V I E S Sphere Directed by Barry Levinson Starring Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone and Samuel L. Jackson - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ALSO THIS WEEK The Wedding Singer Drew Barrymore steals the bouquet from Adam Sandler - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - LAST WEEK Zero Effect A paranoid private detective on the trail of true love The Replacement Killers A Hong Kong superstar gets lost in his Hollywood debut - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - RECENTLY A full list of recent reviews, interviews and table talk. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Blue Glow DAILY TV PICKS - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE ARCHIVES MOVIES TELEVISION INTERVIEWS FEATURES

For roughly its first hour, "Sphere" sustains an atmosphere of hushed visual raptness. The scientists assembled to investigate a 300-year-old alien craft discovered beneath the Pacific go about their business in the watery calm while, a thousand feet above them, a typhoon rages. We don't see the storm, though the first scenes might make you feel you've landed in it. In this adaptation of Michael Crichton's thriller, every one of the opening scenes is devoted to pumping information at the reader. But the director, Barry Levinson, tears through the exposition with the impatient recklessness of a man on the freeway who's 30 minutes late for his own wedding. Barely anyone in the cast -- Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, Samuel L. Jackson, Liev Schreiber and Peter Coyote -- gets what could be described as an entrance; they're halfway through their first scene before we've even been told who they are or what they're doing. Levinson employs a sort of sleight of hand, keeping cinematographer Adam Greenberg's camera in constant motion and using overlapping dialogue. He's plowing through these scenes hoping we don't notice the contrivances (like the warnings to the scientists about being crushed if they try to return to the surface too rapidly, or the mention of an emergency escape sub). But when Levinson finally gets his actors in the drink, we can see why he was so eager to get there. Most movies set underwater take on the sluggishness that comes with watching people take 30 seconds to cover 20 feet. In "Sphere," we might as well be floating down in the water with the actors, taking in everything as they do. The storytelling is so clumsy that it's often not clear what's going on (the screenplay is credited to Stephen Hauser and Paul Attanasio from an adaptation by Kurt Wimmer), but I didn't always register the narrative vagueness because the images in the first half make such mesmerizing visual sense. This is the only work I've seen from Adam Greenberg that can stand with his sinister, night-blooming photography in the vampire thriller "Near Dark" (1987). The slightly drugged pace feels appropriate to a setting where the slowness of movement imposed on the characters gives them time to drink in the beauty around them while denying them the possibility of fleeing swiftly from the horrors. Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" figures in the plot, and at its best, "Sphere" conveys an adventure-book sense of wonder: a submarine making its way diagonally through the dimly glowing green depths; the faces of the scientists illuminated in the glass masks of their diving suits (rather like the spacesuits at the beginning of "Alien"); those same faces rising up out of the receding water of an air lock; the fat bubbles snaking along the underbelly of the alien craft; the sparkling bits of sand picked out by flashlights; a woman walking along the ocean floor followed by a jellyfish as if it were her familiar; and most of all the sphere itself, a perfect golden orb with a surface like rippling water. The sphere's simple elegance is far more impressive than the gargantuan effects of most science-fiction pictures (the visual effects were supervised by Jeffrey A. Okun); it's like getting to go to the World's Fair as a kid and having it be just as amazing as you hoped. And then it all goes to hell. In the second half, with the action confined to the ship while the sphere works its influence, the movie loses its cohesive visual logic. This part of the movie, much of it flashing lights and fire and explosions, with the camera held in so close to the actors and making such quick, jerky movements you often can't tell what you're looking at, is indistinguishable from the fashionable visual cacophony of your average action extravaganza. Story-wise, the second half of the movie is virtually incoherent. After Jackson succeeds in entering the sphere, there's no telling why his colleagues (who are ostensibly there to investigate) don't ask him what he's seen inside, or later, why Hoffman sides with him against Stone after he's just warned her Jackson is behaving irrationally. The tensions between the characters (including an affair gone wrong between Stone and Hoffman) are supposed to turn the movie into a game of "Who do you trust?" But since, as written, these characters barely exist, and because the story is far too convoluted, there's no suspense in wondering who has or hasn't come under the alien influence. It's meant to be suspenseful uncertainty, but it just seems like the filmmakers accidentally snipped a couple of crucial scenes in the editing room. With lines like, "I don't know what this is, but it isn't God's creation," or, "You're worried what will happen if it falls into the wrong hands," there's not much that even a group of actors as talented as this can do. Hoffman shows hints of trying to inject some skeptical humor into his role, but no actor can survive having to play psychoanalyst to an unseen entity that communicates via computer screen. And it's depressing to see Sharon Stone stuck in a big-budget version of the grade-B stinkers she started out in. What's wrong with Hollywood? How hard can it be to find a good part for this woman? Smart, funny, sexy -- what more do you need? You can tell the filmmakers don't get Stone as soon as we find out that her character has a suicide attempt and institutionalization behind her (she can play vulnerable; she's not believable as fragile). At least Stone looks fetching in her short haircut. And she has a few close-ups that convey more character and tension than anything in the script. Except for "Bugsy," which had an old-style Hollywood sheen, Levinson's best work ("Diner," "Wag the Dog") has an improvisational comic looseness. He doesn't have the cunning or the hack's bag of tricks that would allow him to bull his way through a big dumb genre picture. He's as wrong for "Sphere" as he was for his last Crichton adaptation, "Disclosure." But then, who ought to direct Michael Crichton, anyway? Investment brokers, maybe. (The only filmmaker who ever made a good movie out of one of his books was Philip Kaufman, with "Rising Sun," and he did it by completely subverting the novel.) Crichton may be drawn to science fiction, but for the technical folderol, not for the fiction. His is a deeply unimaginative sensibility, more Popular Mechanics than Weird Tales. As expressed in "Sphere," his idea of science fiction is ripping off the monsters-from-the-id gimmick from "Forbidden Planet" and ending up with a little sermon about how man is not yet ready to be trusted with advanced knowledge. By the time the three leads are exorcising their memories of the sphere for the good of the planet, even the parting images of the thing look tarnished. "Sphere" winds up just a load of balls. SALON | Feb. 13 1998  Charles Taylor is a regular contributor to Salon.

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