And the source material is more difficult, to be fair.
Levinson never figured out how to strike that balance in Sphere. Spielberg elevated it even further with cutting edge CGI and exhilarating images of dinosaurs biting people in half while they sat on toilets. The genius of Jurassic Park is that just like Crichton’s book it seamlessly combined heady philosophical questions about the use and misuse of technology with great story-telling. But he might not have been the right director for this film. He makes more character driven, and less spectacular, films like Rain Man and Good Morning Vietnam. Barry Levinson, who directed Sphere, is more cerebral. He just intuitively understands what makes a good compelling blockbuster. Steven Spielberg is one of the all-time great spectacle-makers of our times. And of course the choice of director is pretty important. By contrast, he received no screenwriting credit on Sphere.
But he was apparently pretty actively involved. Michael Crichton wrote the original adapted screenplay for Jurassic Park, which was later reworked and rewritten. But I think the main reason the two films diverged on their paths comes down to who wrote and directed each one. And of course to compare any film to Jurassic Park sets an impossibly high bar. I think the disappointment stems from the fact that with the budget, cast and source material it was working with we expected much more and it delivered a merely middling product. I will concede, it’s a bit of an unfair question. In short, why isn’t Sphere as good as Jurassic Park? Specifically the mystery of why it’s possible to adapt one best selling sci-fi book into one of the greatest and most profitable films of all time, and then to apply the exact same formula to another best-selling sci-fi book by the same author and have it come up flatter than a non-spherical object, such as a pancake. The mysteries of life.Īnd Sphere is all about the mysteries of life. He died on the same day that Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election. I was such a little aspiring nerd back then that I considered Michael Crichton to be my hero. And, somewhere in the middle of all that, he found the time to create the number one rated television show, E.R. He was churning out best sellers, which were being adapted into films that broke all sorts of box office records.
To truly understand the 1998 movie adaptation of Michael Crichton’s best-selling underwater sci-fi thriller Sphere, we have to take ourselves back in time.