The only reason I saw this movie was because my friend got some free passes -- I'm certainly glad I didn't have to *pay* for this. My brain has blocked out most of the memories of this movie, but I'll write about what I can remember.

A spaceship is found in the ocean, so a bunch of scientists are sent to investigate, including Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, Samuel L. Jackson, and Queen Latifah. Somehow they figure out that the spaceship was an American ship that came from the future. And somewhere along the line Queen Latifah gets killed by a swarm of jellyfish. Then Harry (Samuel L. Jackson's character) finds a big sphere that gives him telepathic powers when he comes out of it. The gang makes contact with something that seems to be an alien being, and Dustin Hoffman is able to crack its communication code so that the alien can communicate with them on their submarine's computer. The alien sends strange messages like, "Hello, my name is Jerry. How are you?" Well somewhere along the line they figure out that they weren't communicating with an alien named Jerry -- they were actually telepathically communicating with the brain of Harry. Apparently Dustin Hoffman messed up when he was cracking the code, and he substituted all H's for J's and all A's for E's -- which makes absolutely no sense, because the first message they had received was, "Hello, my name is Jerry." If the code was really messed up wouldn't it have read, "Jello, my neme is Jerry"?

Dustin Hoffman and Sharon Stone eventually go to the sphere too, and this is followed by lots of chase scenes wherein the gang is chased by a bunch of creepy monsters that are actually manifestations of their thoughts. Somehow they end up being rescued (I forget how) and in the end, the three of them are alone together, about to be questioned about their experiences with the "sphere." For some reason, they decide not to reveal what happened, and they use their new telepathic powers to make themselves forget everything that happened. Too bad I didn't have those powers myself.

Response From RinkWorks:

The code was originally "broken" by Harry, actually. And the scene where he does it is crazy -- he comes waltzing over to look at the computer screen, which is spewing out line after line of ASCII. The guy who's working on the computer says, "Must be a glitch, a memory dump or something," or something to that effect, then Harry says, "No, if it were a memory dump, it would be random." And I'm thinking, "Number one, there is no way he could see a pattern in that amount of junk that quickly, but I'll give him that as a plot point or something (he was supposed to be "different" ever since coming back from the Sphere). But number two, unless the computer was used for nothing else but generating random numbers, a memory dump WOULDN'T BE RANDOM ANYWAY!" If you're looking at the ASCII representation of whatever the computer was holding in memory at that time, it's going to have some sort of pattern to it *anyway*.

It *was* Dustin Hoffman's character who "re-broke" the code later. And *that* scene was even *worse*, for exactly the reason you specified. I couldn't get past these two key plot points totally falling apart, and, like the rest of the movie, even though it did have a few redeeming features (most notably Samuel L. Jackson's portrayal of Harry). What a silly movie.

-- Dave.