i'm spoiled . long before i had ever read a single michael crichton novel , i read stanislaw lem , the polish science-fiction writer who has far more to say in one book than crichton has had to say in all of his . the book in question was solaris , a novel about a planet that appears to be a life form unto itself . crichton probably didn't plagarize solaris to write sphere , but it's simply an infinitely inferior book compared to lem's novel . sphere , the movie from said novel , suffers from all the same drawbacks . worse , there has already been a movie made of solaris , by the russian filmmaker andrei tarkovsky , which is haunting and chilling in ways that this film , directed passively by barry levinson as a holding action before wag the dog , cannot even begin to conceive of . the plot : a ways back , a psychologist by the name of norma hoffman ( played by * dustin * hoffman ) , put together a government report on what to do if e . t . comes calling . he named several colleagues of his as members of a " contact team " -- almost jokingly , it seems , but the government gets the last laugh when the team is activated for a mission to the south pacific . sure enough , down on the ocean floor , there are the remains of a spaceship that crashed there -- almost 300 years ago . ( there is one funny moment straight from the book about the maker of the ship's electronics that i will not spoil here . ) what they find is by turns intriguing and idiotic . a pattern gets set up : we get the hint of something that may be an explanation , and then we're forced to discard it and start from absolute scratch . this is annoying . when we finally do understand what the sam hill is going on , it doesn't make any sense -- and the conclusion the movie tries to draw from it is just plain limp . the effects are decent , but they are no more than a light show to support a movie that really isn't about much of anything . i kept harkening back to the abyss , which generated horrible suspense with nothing more than a broken umbilical cable -- or the exploding rivets of das boot . nothing like that holds the attention here . the actors try . they do not get far . samuel jackson is probably the best of the bunch , since he can pretty much survive anything through a show of attitude . sharon stone , who is a better actor than people realize ( see last dance and casino , and the upcoming the mighty ! ) , is totally lost . and dustin hoffman himself does a reprise of the same territory he did with outbreak . no wonder they're content to just drift : the material they're given doesn't afford them a chance to really make their performances matter . so . when do we get a tarkovsky revival ? 
