Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within-If only you had put out...
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is a really weird bird. The budget for Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was enormous and ultimately lead to financial disaster as the film failed to find an audience. Now, with that said, you must know one fact immediately about this film. This is one beautiful animated feature. Few animated works to date will show off what your new HD set or HD projector can do better than this work and I can’t wait until the day comes that it is available on HD-DVD or Blue-Ray.
So then, if it is so beautiful, what happened you ask? Pretty much everything went wrong on this one. The core problem is director Hironobu Sakaguchi and writers Al Reinert and Jeff Vintar simply forgot who the hell buys all the Final Fantasy video games, upon which the film is based. The movie did not appeal to the fan base in the least.
The story, which I will get into briefly, only remotely at best, follows the universe of the video games. Look at it this way. It would be like making a Star Trek movie that was really a Western. Now, the way the Star Trek franchise is going we may see that soon, but regardless, you see the problem. The world of Final Fantasy, usually has a feel of antiquity and focuses on monsters and magic and the like, you know the kind of stuff that keeps guys from ever feeling the touch of a woman.
The world of The Spirits Within is much more a world of sci-fi with only traces of the mythology of the video games. None of the beloved and long established characters are represented and the sort of earth mother, Gaia philosophy that is at the core of the games is mutated nearly beyond recognition. Gone to are the epic sword battles, impressive lightning laced spells, strange creatures and the like. You get the idea. It would be like having your prom date show up and this date is hot, I mean pretty hot, but kind of dull overall. You’re thinking, so what I can live with that, well, not if you’re a guy and your prom date is guy and your not gay. Get the picture. No matter how pretty this guy happens to be, dam pretty even, your pissed. This is what happened with The Spirits Within, plain and simple.
How bad was the blood letting you may ask? Bad, real bad. $125-$140 million goes in and approximately $30-$40 million comes out. Bad enough? It was bad enough the it pretty much finished Square Pictures–that’s bad. It would be misleading to conclude that all the problem was that the loyalty and interest of the Final Fantasy fans was too low. That is only part of the picture. The other part of the problem is the script. In short, the script lacked originality and clearly was over reliant on the visuals. The story simply failed to engaged and seemed rehashed.
Blandly we followed the adventures of scientist Aki Ross in the year 2065 where man kind was forced to wall itself off in force fielded cities due to the invasion of a mysterious alien force/race known as the Phantoms. Ross wants to rid the Earth of the invaders via a peaceful process she helped develop but others, namely General Hein want to use a massive cannon. Fine, most plots reduced to a couple of sentences don’t sound very interesting, but its flat. Writers Reinert and Vintar dropped the ball on this one and took Square Pictures down with it. But its not their fault, this should never have been the big budget first effort for Square Pictures for it did not give the audience base they were literally banking on what they wanted to see. A much closer attempt was made many years later, with a much lower budget, called Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. Visually it is more interesting, but more importantly it was much more in line with what the fan based wanted. Had this been the first film Square Pictures produced and promoted, the entire affair may have ended differently. For the record, I was rooting for them to pull it off.
But there are other problems as well, there is a fair degree of difference in the way that characters looked. Obviously some characters like Aki Ross had much more attention given to them than others and this hurts the overall look and feel of the project. The voice acting is flat at points as if to say, “hey look this is an animated thing you know, hey, whatever.” Then, there is the ending, without giving it away, it’s a bit confusing, especially if your not a sci-fi fan or well-versed in the “science meets earth energy mumbo jumbo” that the Japanese, God love em, crank out like there’s no tomorrow. If you’re a movie buff, like animation or are in the mood for something commercial but a little off-beat, give it a try. Most certainly pop it in if The Spirits Within are ever released on Blue Ray and you can watch it on a HD set or HD projector. That will likely boost all the scores below a bit.
Story D+ (This should have never been made as a Final Fantasy film, period. That said, the plot is rehashed but could have been made workable with more imagination and effort.)
Acting C (Some decent performances, but there are also a lot of going through the motions to get the paycheck performances as well. Not cool, but I won’t name names this time. I’ll let you figure it out.)
Visuals A+ (The saving grace of the film for sure. It is just marvelous to look at, especially back when it was released. Some of the CG characters were the best scene at that time and for that reason the project has made its mark.)
Originality/Innovation A-/D (I know this grade doesn’t look right, let me explain. On the technical side, highly innovative, but not completely consistent thus a A-. On the script side, conceptualization, and choice to move ahead with this particular script lands the grade of D).
Enjoyability Grade C+
Home Theater/HD Factor A+ (This should be a great pick for flexing the muscle of a home theater in HD.)
Overall Grade C-
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