Do you even know what you owe to Michael Crichton? How many flights he made bearable? How many rainy weekends at your aunt and uncle’s cottage where you weren’t allowed to flush pee? You may not really understand, let me go on: he gave you George Clooney. Biography of Michael Crichton: he is now dead, he was super tall (6’9), he wrote well over 12,000 books, he was very smart, he got a little weird in later years, and we should all be worshipping his golden statue for having given us so much pleasure. Speaking of! Let’s talk about Michael Crichton. And that scenario would make for a fascinating Michael Crichton novel, would it not? You can tell me you did, but unless it happened in a controlled environment where you were raised in captivity away from Michael Crichton novels and then watched Sphere and answered a series of plot questions of my choosing, I’m going to think you’re snowing me. Literally no human being who watched Sphere without reading the book understood what the hell was going on.

The big ticket item? They spent $300K to build the scientific lab set. And you can say “it’s what the people want,” but Sphere made back less than half its budget and The Andromeda Strain made… I mean, it was 1971, so enough to pay for Sharon Stone’s wet suits on Sphere, probably, but no one was sitting on a $45 million dollar loss. Which, whatever, there are plenty of sexy scientists in the world (I mean, have you seen Lisa Randall? Rowr!) and Dustin Hoffman is not necessarily having panties thrown at him in recent years, but it legitimately was a time in which sci-fi movies tried to be about sci-fi. And, to my earlier point about the gap between The Andromeda Strain and Sphere, here is what a team of scientists and hangers-on looked like on-camera in 1971:Īnd here is what they looked like in 1998: We need to breathe through it, come to acceptance, and move on. I mean, we’re mostly going to be talking about Michael Crichton’s novels, but to prattle on happily for several paragraphs about Sphere without acknowledging what Barry Levinson did to it would be like not picturing a blue Billy Crudup in your head while re-reading Watchmen. What a difference 27 years makes, huh? I’m referring to the gap between the 1971 film adaptation of Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain and the 1998… whatever that was… of Sphere.

Sphere crichton