Having recently reread the original novel by Micheal Crichton, I was kind of eager to take a look at the film adaptation again. I remember being very disappointed with it at the time, but I also don’t recall if I’d read the novel before or after or not.

Going into it this time, I knew that despite the pitch of the subject matter, it was going to be more cerebral than any of the advertising made it look, which is why it may not have performed as well as they may have wanted it to at the theatres.

A group of specialists are called to a point somewhere in the middle of the Pacific among them is a psychologist, Norman (Dustin Hoffman), a mathematician, Harry (Samuel L. Jackson), a biochemist, Beth (Sharon Stone), an astrophysicist, Ted (Liev Schreiber) and a military man, Barnes (Peter Coyote).

Norman is an expert on PTSD and plane crashes, he also wrote a report about what to do when humanity encounters an unknown lifeform. And that is apparently what has happened. One thousand feet down, something has been discovered, buried in coral for three hundred years, a spacecraft.

But no one is ready for what they learn about it, and what they discover inside it. It’s right there in the title, a sphere, but what is it? And what effect is it having on the team?

Levinson has always felt like a director who is more interested in exploring one’s headspace rather than embracing action beats, and while there are a couple in the film, and in the original novel, this one is all about the human condition, our triggers, our stressors, and our fears.

The casting is solid, and the special effects involved, except for, arguably, the sphere itself, are solid. But ten years after films like The Abyss, Leviathan, Deepstar Six, were audiences willing to go underwater for an adventure that didn’t play out the way they thought? Not to mention that the release trailer gives away WAY TOO MUCH of the things that should have been surprising for the audience.

There are obviously some changes from novel to film, but for the most part, the film stays fairly close to the novel. It doesn’t quite give us the depth of the characters that the book does, but you’re working in a different format, a visual one instead of a literary one, and that requires the audience to pay attention to pick up the character beats and the layered connections that affect them.

This time through, I enjoyed most of it, it could have been a much longer and layered film (or limited series) though there are some changes in the final act which makes you wonder if it was a request from the studio or how the script was adapted.

It definitely wasn’t as bad as it was made out to be at the time.