Sphere is a big-budget dive movie with a major league cast: Dustin Hoffman, Samuel L. Jackson and Sharon Stone. With actors like that, it has to be great, right? They wouldn't be in it if it wasn't, right?

Well, no. Sphere starts off okay. A team of diverse intellectual superstars is brought together to act as the welcoming committee for an alien spaceship that's been discovered on the ocean floor, 1000 feet below the surface of the Pacific. The fact that none of these people are divers is apparently not a problem. They take an eight-hour resort course then zoom down to a seafloor habitat on a heliox saturation dive. Ah, okay.

Before you know it, they're in the spaceship and strange things start happening -- jellyfish attacks, giant squid attacks ... they even start attacking one another. The problem is that, for very complicated reasons, they can't tell the difference between illusion and reality -- and the audience can't either. That makes the plot a little tough to follow. Throw in a dumb ending and what you get is a less-than-stellar movie.

The dive scenes, though, are short but frequent and were enough to save Sphere for us. Kind of.