Don't bother.
The writing is terrible - the characters' motives and actions make no sense whatsoever. As a viewer we are asked to accept so much incredibly bad stuff . . . yeah, it makes perfect sense that an 'alien' would communicate by mapping a keyboard onto a sphere and numbering the keys in a spiral fashion starting from the center. Perfect sense. Or that you could mistranslate 'My name is Harry' into 'My name is Jerry' but not mistranslate anything else that he was saying.
Or how about the 'inevitable' conclusion that the fact nobody knows what happens in the future means that everyone died? I'd say it's a lot more likely that information of that nature would at the least be kept confidential, or (as they weakly wrapped up the plot) simply not spread beyond the surviving crew members Don't get me started on the other plot holes. What the hell happened to the dark-haired woman? Oh there's a noise outside. Huh, it's her dead body. What could have done this to her? NOBODY EVER KNOWS OR BOTHERS TO FIND OUT.
And the dialogue was really awful too. 'You know me. I believe everything'. There were very few lines in this movie that sounded like a real person would ever speak them. Samuel Jackson's character was a mishmash of weirdness - he spent far too much of the movie seeming like some sort of evil agent of the sphere, when it turns out that he's just a raging idiot. Well played.
What really bothers me is that underneath all this crap, is a halfway decent idea. I have not read Crighton's novel, for all I know it is tolerable or even decent. But whatever it is, this adaptation is absolutely godawful. I feel stupider for having watched it; I feel stupider for being a member of a race which has other individuals who would rate this miscarriage of filmography as anything other than utter dreck.
The writing is terrible - the characters' motives and actions make no sense whatsoever. As a viewer we are asked to accept so much incredibly bad stuff . . . yeah, it makes perfect sense that an 'alien' would communicate by mapping a keyboard onto a sphere and numbering the keys in a spiral fashion starting from the center. Perfect sense. Or that you could mistranslate 'My name is Harry' into 'My name is Jerry' but not mistranslate anything else that he was saying.
Or how about the 'inevitable' conclusion that the fact nobody knows what happens in the future means that everyone died? I'd say it's a lot more likely that information of that nature would at the least be kept confidential, or (as they weakly wrapped up the plot) simply not spread beyond the surviving crew members Don't get me started on the other plot holes. What the hell happened to the dark-haired woman? Oh there's a noise outside. Huh, it's her dead body. What could have done this to her? NOBODY EVER KNOWS OR BOTHERS TO FIND OUT.
And the dialogue was really awful too. 'You know me. I believe everything'. There were very few lines in this movie that sounded like a real person would ever speak them. Samuel Jackson's character was a mishmash of weirdness - he spent far too much of the movie seeming like some sort of evil agent of the sphere, when it turns out that he's just a raging idiot. Well played.
What really bothers me is that underneath all this crap, is a halfway decent idea. I have not read Crighton's novel, for all I know it is tolerable or even decent. But whatever it is, this adaptation is absolutely godawful. I feel stupider for having watched it; I feel stupider for being a member of a race which has other individuals who would rate this miscarriage of filmography as anything other than utter dreck.