If for nothing else it's enjoyable for it's entertainment value.
shareWell mostly when people are salty about a good movie its when they haven't followed the books/novels every single word said. I mean thats what i have experienced at least when people salty about a movie that actually is good and has some very good actors in it!
shareI liked it better than the novel personally. Although I do love the book a lot as well
shareFor one, they should have shown the freakin' squid. They showed it in the book and a tentacle even grabbed a character. If I recall correctly, another character was chased by it through one of the habitats. I guess they were trying to save money. But there is no doubt that they indeed were manifesting the squid, so why not show it? Seemed cheap.
MOVIES BY THE MINUTE --> http://moviesbytheminute.blogspot.com
It wasn't about saving money at all, Levinson used the "Hitchcock theory" where fear of the unknown is greater than what is shown. It wasn't a monster movie.
shareI get the Hitchcock thing, but the novel was not like that. The whole point is that the sphere actually manifests real things, including monster-like aquatic creatures. Let's put it this way, even Spielberg showed the shark sometimes. And I absolutely believe it was about saving money. To recreate the intense scenes in the book involving the giant squid and our main characters would have cost $$ to make it look realistic.
I should mention that, aside from that, I did enjoy the movie overall.
MOVIES BY THE MINUTE --> http://moviesbytheminute.blogspot.com
Levinson used the "Hitchcock theory" where fear of the unknown is greater than what is shown.Yeah, he shows the small stuff, but not the big stuff. So we see a few jelly fish, some white round things (never explained), but were smaller squid in the novel, a single sea snake, but just have the aquatic habitat shaken (which got very repetitive) for the giant squid. It seemed like a cop-out and likely was. 🐭 share
I've watched this movie many times over the years, and never once felt that anything was missing by not showing the squid. Maybe if I were 20 years old and grew up in an age where everything is CGI and spoon fed to us I might feel differently, but one of the best movies ever made (Jaws) doesn't show the shark until very late in the movie, and I've never heard a single person complain about that. The scenes where you don't see it, but know it's lurking beneath the surface are the scariest of the movie, helped tremendously by it's simple but elegant score. We all know the squid is there and real in this movie, manifested by someone who has entered the sphere, there's no reason to physically show the squid itself. I also don't believe it was budget related, but only a select few people know the definitive answer to that. This movie had a budget of $80 million supposedly, which for its time was one of the biggest budgets of any movie ever made. I doubt that they would've spent all of that money and then skimped on the squid if they felt it was essential in any way to the movie.
shareWhat do I not like ?
Everything.
Bad script, bad acting, bad direction, bad editing
Almost unwatchable. Incoherent. Disjointed.
It's a big concept to convey but this one stinks.
Not true at all, you must not have seen a lot of bad movies to compare this to.
shareCompletely agree, WallyB. I think it's a terrible adaptation of a phenomenal book. No tension, don't care about the characters, bad editing, it's truly a complete mess. The 6.0 out of 10 rating it has here on IMDB is way too generous.
shareMy motto is: Whenever possible, never read the book before watching the movie. It's destined to be a massive let down. Books are long, detailed, with plenty of time to devote to each character and scenario. Even multiple seasons of a television series adaptation usually can't retain all that's acquired from a book. Not to mention, when you hear actors repeating dialogue that you've previously read, knowing they're merely reading it too, it could make it more difficult to suspend disbelief when you're trying to convince yourself the characters you are watching are real, as opposed to just reciting something that you'd read long before. In general, I think if you already have the book in mind then it's quite an extraordinary feat when the film or TV adaptation lives up to it. I remember watching The Green Mile, for instance, after having read the book, and actually thinking the film felt too short because of all it left out — and that was a 3-hour+ long film.
Luckily, I saw Sphere several times long before ever getting my hands on the novel. I had no expectations going in, it wasn't hyped up to me (or hyped down to me) by anyone (I was young when it was initially released and advertised), and, really, it was just something I'd stumbled upon by chance and could walk into cold (a luxury we should be lucky enough to have for any movie). I thought it was great from the get-go and still great with repeated viewings in later years. The characters had well-defined personalities, the music and the quiet and abrupt fades to chapter titles was really mysterious (in a similar fashion to the sudden titles sequences that popped up in Kubrick's The Shining), and it was one of those rare fantasy/sci-fi films that actually nailed that Twilight Zone-esque, eerie-without-going-for-cheap-thrills (such as the aforementioned "seeing the monster" thing) vibe. It was mysterious, creepy, imaginative, claustrophobic, had a refreshing non-Hollywood style (not counting that whole countdown to the dramatic explosion climax), it had that constant unnerving feeling that "something isn't right here" (another Twilight Zone trademark), and it had me always thinking and theorizing about what was going on. It liked it so much that I eventually purchased the book because of it.
Admittedly, I've always been a sucker for creepy mysteries about small groups stuck someplace together while something really weird is going on that they can't explain. Even when that formula is adhered to in what critics usually agree are unquestionably "bad" movies (two more Stephen King TV-movie adaptations, The Langoliers and Storm of the Century, come to mind), I can't help but get a great guilty pleasure out of it. When I read Crichton's novel sometime later, I got that same vibe and loved it just as much, and probably more, than the film. I have a sneaking suspicion, however, that if I'd read the novel first then I may be bashing the movie just like everyone else. As it is, I'd already established that I enjoy the movie before reading the book, though. Reading it afterwards was more like watching a directors cut of something I already loved.
S.C.W.
www.TheGutterMonkey.com