Just recently I catched the movie "Sphere" on TV. I had neither seen it when it was new or rented it later on because just about anyone -professional crtitics and friends alike- said it sucked...big time.

Well, I must say they were correct. Normally I can find something good in any film, but here I was at a loss. This movie should be shown to film students as an example of how to make a bad movie, even if you have all the right ingredients at hand. "Sphere" had a great cast (Hoffman, Jackson, Stone) and obviously no small budget. Also the story's premise -alien spaceship in deep sea is investigated by a bunch of specialists from different fields- seemed promising enough.

But if the writing is bad or the director is unable to overcome bad writing with style and his own inventions you end up with an incoherent mess like this. The movie got worse and worse the longer it went on. I really tried to like it, but the ideas -some of them evidently lifted from classics like "Alien" or "Solaris"- were crudely glued together with nothing much to keep them from falling apart.

Funny side note: In one sequence the crew sits in front of a computer screen, allegedly trying to decipher an alien code, a computer-savvy person could clearly see that they were staring at a Linux screen showing some random directory listings. How could the makers of this film so misjudge the sci-fi thriller audience which is bound to include a lot of computer geeks laughing their asses off at such a ludicrous depiction of computers?

The flick's conclusion is not very good either and leaves you disappointed, because it doesn't make much sense. If sometime in the future an American spaceship brings back this "sphere" thingy for whose powers "mankind is not ready yet", why not warn officials of this so the whole mess wouldn't happen in the future to begin with?

Anyway:This movie could have been great, but it's not. End of story.