Sphere
Christ, common Crichton crap. It’s like Andromeda Strain meets Prometheus, mixed with Solaris. The finale is utterly pointless, there is literally a reset and all arcs are undone.
Our hero is a psychiatrist who wrote a bogus report for the Bush administration (the other one, CIA Man Bush Sr.). That report was a blueprint for first contact with aliens, mentioned his buddies as “experts” and borrowed liberally from the great sci-fi writers like Isaac Asimov and Rod Serling. Note how Michael Crichton is not one of them…
Anyway, the US Military does find an alien ship, in the bottom of the ocean. The expert team is brought in, incognito, and explores the spacecraft, looking for clues. Turns out it’s an American spaceship from the future, with labels in English and Spanish. It went into a black hole and brought back the monolith from 2001, as a sphere. So far, so Planet of the Apes/Event Horizon.
What follows in a slasher as if Ed Wood had a massive budget and bona fide actors. Truly, it really reminds me of that scene in Ed Wood with the kiddie pool, what a crock of shit.
The film turns into Solaris then: the power of the Sphere is to manifest the inner dreams of the people that interact with it. With the palpable sexual tension between the three main characters, a full-on multi-racial multi-gendered orgy is not on the cards because this is the 90s and this is PG-13. You would need to wait for Sense8.
Anyway, after some of the people enthralled with the monolith snap out of it for plot-related reasons, they get back topside and make a pact to literally forget everything to avoid a temporal paradox, and the sphere goes back home. The end, roll credits.
The level of actors doing stupid shit is off the charts. I’m not kidding about the sexual tension, Dustin Hoffman looks like is holding back a massive orgasm when he is alone with both Sharon Stone and Samuel L. Jackson. Even before he is enthralled by the Sphere, Samuel L. Jackson literally bathes and dresses up slowly in front of Dustin Hoffman. A very weird film all around.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.