I was thinking about Michael Crichton’s Sphere.
The setup is so good. The middle and ending not so much.
And the movie is like a direct port of the book, which is nice.
I re-read it and re-watch the movie for the beginning. For the setup.
What I remember from the setup:
- They fly a team of clever scientists out to a ship
- The team has to go to the site underwater, then stay because of a storm
- The military have found “something” and the team need to figure out what it is.
- It looks like an alien ship, but says USA on it.
- They go over and find the sphere.
After that it kind of goes off the rails.
Here’s a summary of the setup from gpt4o:
In Sphere by Michael Crichton, the story begins with a team of American scientists being assembled by the U.S. Navy to investigate a mysterious spacecraft discovered 1,000 feet beneath the Pacific Ocean. The team—composed of a psychologist (Norman Johnson), a mathematician, a biologist, and an astrophysicist—is sent to an underwater habitat near the alien vessel to analyze it.
As they explore the ship, they find that it is of American origin and appears to have traveled through time, yet it contains no crew. Inside, they discover a large, perfect metallic sphere that seems to defy scientific understanding. The setup builds suspense as the team grapples with the psychological and physical effects of their deep-sea isolation and the strange power the sphere seems to exert over them.
Yep. Matches my memory.
Here’s a cool pic from the movie of some of the scientists in front of the sphere:
Not sure what I expect from the setup, but it does not satisfy.
What we get is a lot of infighting, fair enough, and then the sphere is an alien intelligence or something and acts like an upset child.
Meh.
Summary of the middle from gpt4o:
After the team discovers the mysterious sphere aboard the sunken spacecraft, one member—Harry, the mathematician—enters it. Shortly after, strange and dangerous phenomena begin occurring in the underwater habitat: giant squids appear, computer systems behave erratically, and hallucination-like events put everyone’s lives at risk. The crew suspects that these manifestations are being caused by contact with the sphere, which seems to grant unconscious thoughts and fears the power to become real.
Tensions rise as the team becomes increasingly paranoid and unstable. Each scientist begins to suspect the others of influencing reality through subconscious fear or desire, and it becomes clear that the sphere has given at least one of them—possibly more—the ability to create physical manifestations through thought.
Summary of the end from gpt4o:
Eventually, the surviving team members—Norman, Beth, and Harry—realize that they have all entered the sphere and acquired its reality-warping powers. They understand that their fears and emotions are the source of the increasingly deadly events around them.
In the climax, they barely escape back to the surface alive. Realizing the sphere’s power is too dangerous for humanity, they decide to hypnotically erase their memories of it. As a result, the knowledge of the sphere—and its reality-altering abilities—is forgotten, leaving it safely hidden once more in the deep ocean.
That’s right.
The sphere manifests a giant squid and they are the cause of the problems.
Nope. Not into it.
I asked for a better middle and end from gpt4o (wide open question, I know) and got the sphere as an intelligence test for new species. Meh.
Not sure what I want. Maybe switch over to event horizon and go full horror :)