Display MoreThe Wing Commander movie club has nothing to fear but Sphere itself! The general consensus is that while there's some material of interest in Sphere it doesn't really come together in the end… and it spends a lot of time not quite getting there! In the week before the screening, a lot of people told me that Sphere was a guilty pleasure because they had seen it in theaters when it came out. And there's an argument that that's actually the best kind of movie: one you can enjoy in spite of itself.
... while Sphere may not be a timeless classic, we immediately saw that it had a pretty tangible impact on the Wing Commander movie. We knew going in that this was one of three movies referenced by Digital Anvil's spectacular opening titles… and just like 1492, the influence was obvious in the first seconds of the film. Like 1492, Sphere uses historical drawings as part of the backdrop for the titles… but it also has text that flashes in and out and floats horizontally like Wing Commander and it has flashes of scarier monsters between the historical drawings like Wing Commander's Kilrathi frames. Here's the Sphere intro:
If you want to know more about the Wing Commander introduction, we took a pretty comprehensive look its elements when we talked about 1492: Conquest of Paradise. Here's where a few line up in Sphere:
No joke, Sully spent the entire movie curled up sleeping with his little paw covering his eyes.
