Sphere (1998) – WTF Happened to This Adaptation?

The WTF Happened to This Adaptation series takes a look back at Sphere, based on a novel by Michael Crichton

You guys really seem to be digging on Michael Crichton huh? Well let’s look at what almost stopped his adaptations from happening. After a heck of a run from his adaptations both good and mediocre, Sphere would be a big enough bomb that it would follow with two straight sub-par adaptations before a quiet death of his worked being put on the big screen. The movie should have been a no doubt success with stars like Dustin Hoffman, Sam Jackson, Sharon Stone and a more than capable, Oscar winning, director in Barry Levinson. What we would end up with is one of the biggest bombs of the late 90s and a movie that is derided or outright forgotten from the annals of 90s cinema. Was it the cast, the story, or the general public being over Chricton things that didn’t have dinosaurs in it that was the culprit. Enter the Sphere and let’s hope this video does better than its subject as we find out what happened to the adaptation of Sphere.

The Movie

After Jurassic Park became one of the biggest movies of the 90s or really, of all time, books by Michael Crichton would become automatic green light projects. The very next year a movie called Disclosure would come out with Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas that was based on a book by Crichton released that very same year. That’s a hell of a turnaround. After that the well would be mined fairly deep with Hollywood going all the way back to 1980 to grab Crichton’s Congo. Check out our adaptation video on that property but suffice to say, it wasn’t a hit along the lines that his prehistoric take would be. Following that would be going back to the dinosaur well with The Lost World: Jurassic Park. While Congo made a respectable 152 million on its 50-million-dollar budget, The Lost World would be a much bigger draw for both critics and audiences making a staggering 618 million on its budget of only 73 million. While this was going on, other Crichton properties would be optioned off including his 1987 book Sphere which would have Warner Brothers assigning Oscar winner Barry Levinson to the director’s chair. Production was taking too long however so he and star Dustin Hoffman would go on to make political satire Wag the Dog.

Levinson would work with Hoffman multiple times throughout their careers with both of them taking home Oscars for Best Actor and Best Director respectively for their most famous collaboration Rain Man. In the realm of horror and sci-fi, Levinson would only have today’s movie and the sneaky good 2012 found footage horror The Bay. Of note, he was also the one to direct the Crichton follow up to Jurassic Park with Disclosure. On the writing side, Kurt Wimmer would get the adaptation credit while Stephen Hauser and Paul Attanasio were given credit for the screenplay. Wimmer has had a fun career that includes big budget movies like The Thomas Crown Affair and the Total Recall remake and cult hits like Equilibrium and Ultraviolet. Hauser only has this movie to his name but has worked with Levinson on a few other movies while Attanasio is a two-time Oscar nominee who also wrote Quiz Show, Disclosure, and Donnie Brasco.

The movie was filmed over 68 days on a Naval base in Vallejo, California and in warehouse-built sets to avoid the same fate of Waterworld and filming on the water. The cast is filled with heavy hitters like Sam Jackson, Sharon Stone, Peter Coyote, and Dustin Hoffman while also using a couple up and comers in Liev Schreiber and Queen Latifah. Hoffman’s stellar, two-time Oscar winning career has almost no horror apart from a 2019 movie called Into the Labyrinth but if you want to see some intense scenes check out Straw Dogs and Marathon Man. Jackson, in his long and varied carrier, has had a few horror films like 1408, Deep Blue Sea, and Cell but notably for this movie he was in Crichton’s most loved adaptation in Jurassic Park. Stone started her career with Wes Craven’s Deadly Blessing but has mostly stayed away from horror apart from Cold Creek Manor. This audience knows her best from Basic Instinct and Total Recall. Peter Coyote, someone I haven’t had the chance to discuss here, has had a sneaky long career and showed up in the 80s iteration of The Twilight Zone as well as regrettably the most recent two Return of the Living Dead movies. He’s also in Southern Comfort which I think is a better watch than Deliverance. Let me know if you want me to cover Southern Comfort, I’d love to. Liev is, like Affleck, the bomb in Phantoms. Finally, Huey Lewis is most famous for killing Weird Al.

The movie was supposed to release Christmas of 97 but was moved to Valentine’s Day the next year to die where, well, it died. It made 73 million on a 73-million-dollar budget and was the beginning death knell for adaptations of the man’s work.

The Book

I don’t really know what else to say about this author as I’ve covered his work pretty consistently in the latter half of 2024. Jurassic Park is and will always be his jam and Congo is way more fun than it has any right to be. The dude was a genius who could do anything he put his mind to from med school to law to programming computer games. Sphere was his sixteenth novel and the 6th one he released under his real name. The story of Sphere was started in 1967 as a sort of companion piece to his runaway hit novel The Andromeda Strain, but he ran into a common problem with alien stories of what the heck do you do? He states that he didn’t want the alien to be a 3-foot grey skin that was overly friendly or a 9-foot-tall murder machine and once he came up with the general idea of what he wanted, he became stuck.

20 years later it would be published in 1987 to generally good reviews with one critic stating that it was a fun read even when you knew what was coming. The book sold well and even though the movie was a huge flop, HBO had planned a TV series based on the novel that as of 2025 has not panned out yet.

What is the same?

A team of scientists with varying specialties and fields along with a support crew and military led personnel are tasked with investigating a mysterious ship that has ended up in the ocean. They discover that the ship is actually human in origin and from the future. There is a giant sphere located inside the ship that does seem to be alien in origin. One of the scientists, Harry, thinks that the whole team will die as there was no record of the ship being found and so there would be nobody to record the data of what they found. Harry eventually goes back to the ship and inside the sphere object.

A tropical storm lands above the crew and leaves them isolated inside the vessel while a mysterious being calling itself Jerry begins to speak to them. Jerry causes a lot of trouble by manifesting creatures that shouldn’t exist like massive shrimp, strange jellyfish, and a giant squid. Members of the team begin to succumb to these creatures, and it is revealed that Jerry is actually named Harry. We also find out that Harry, after going into the sphere, is the one that is manifesting much of the chaos. Beth Halprin and Norman end up sedating Harry to try and stop the creatures, but things still happen and the two become weary of each other with Beth even attempting to kill Norman. All 3 of the team eventually go inside the sphere to gain powers and they eventually decide to escape before the ship explodes from explosives set by Halprin. The three survivors end up in a decompression chamber on the surface where they decide to use the frightening power to forget they have the power.

What is different?

The majority of the book is what we see on screen in an unusual change from what we are used to. Apart from some key differences we will go over, this is a fairly faithful adaptation. To begin with, the movie excised one of the scientists that goes after the ship. Norman, Johnson in the book and Goodman in the movie, Beth Halprin, Harry Adams, and Ted Fielding are the ones in the movie but in the book, they are briefly joined by Arthur Levine who gets sick and leaves before much of the action takes place. Other characters that appear in the book but not the movie are Tina Chan and Rose Levy who are both killed. Deaths in the two versions are consistent in who dies but vary on how it happens. Barnes, played by Coyote in the movie, is crushed by a closing door on film but is killed by the giant squid after going after it in the novel. Ted is also killed by the giant squid in the book but on screen has a much more brutal death where he is trapped by falling metal and then burned by an explosion caused by a gas leak and fire.

Other changes occur with how and when the three main scientists enter the sphere as well as the sphere itself. On film it is a golden liquid in the shape of a sphere that is entered by simply walking into it. The novel’s titular object is more silver and has a door like mechanic that opens and closes while deciding who to let in. this was due to the visual effects of the movie lending itself better to that color but it’s still a noticeable change. While the paranoia is similar on page as it is to screen, how Beth tries to kill Norman is different with a drowning attempt in the movie and a decompression chamber murder in the book. Finally, while the three escape the same in both and end up together agreeing to get rid of their powers, the movie has them all forgetting what is going on while the book heavily implies that Beth kept her powers and secrets from the other two. Also Norman almost leaves the other two to die before going back to grab them. Something not present in the movie.

Verdict

I was bored when I rented this movie at the age of 13 and I was slightly less bored on a rewatch for this. It’s not bad by any stretch but the book just flows better and has that patented Crichton charm that is severely lacking on screen. Maybe a miniseries from one of the many streamers could work out well but for now just read the book and call it a day.

A couple of the previous episodes of WTF Happened to This Adaptation? can be seen below. To see the other shows we have to offer, head over to the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!