Subject: Review: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)

From: John Sylva <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2001 21:48:13 -0000

THE PHANTOM MENACE

FINAL FANTASY: THE SPIRITS WITHIN (2001)
Reviewed by John Sylva
    
       The cliche "style over substance" has fittingly been thrown at 
numerous pictures this year, but no film is more deserving of the title than 
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the latest in the "chilling vision of the 
future" genre currently invading a multiplex near you.  Applauded for its 
arresting visual sweep and realistic CGI human characters, Final Fantasy 
brings to life the popular Playstation game that's widely considered a 
standard for RPGs, or role-playing games, as they're called.  The second 
video game adaptation of the summer (the other being the dismal Lara Croft: 
Tomb Raider), Fantasy offers plenty of eye-candy to keep the 12 year old kid 
in all of us in awe of the extraordinary visual landscapes, but absent is the 
innovation and adventurous spirit needed to successfully bring the 
game-overs, starts/stops and pauses to the big screen. 
       Life, death, dreams, souls–the potential to explore these concepts, 
for which there are no words to accurately describe, is endless with the 
advanced, state-of-the- art technology Fantasy withholds, but the attempts to 
capture a dream on film, to make a testament of life and death and to propose 
the meaning of a soul ultimately fail because, essentially, the film doesn't 
have any of these: there's no dreamy wonder in the meaning of central 
character Dr. Aki Ross' dreams (voiced by Ming-Na of ER), there's no life in 
the screenplay's ideas about life and death on earth and there's certainly no 
soul in the awkwardly plotted picture that takes place on post-apocalyptic 
Earth.  Strikingly similar to this year's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence in 
its bold presentation of what it attempts to preach, Fantasy, unlike A.I., 
lacks meat around the bones: its paper-thin plot, in which alien phantom 
beasts roam Earth after their asteroid arrival, can bear no scrutiny or 
examination whatsoever without completely falling apart–the plot is merely an 
excuse to create truly stunning images that pose as something deeper, 
something grounded in humanity.  Fantasy milks the idea of these radical 
phantoms for all they're worth, placing them wherever the film seems to reach 
a dead end or a point that the action seems to be slowing down.  This, for 
the most part, is how the entire film feels: redundant and uncreative.  
Granted, some effective moments are thrown in here and there: the opening 
sequences, in which Dr. Ross, who's been infected by a phantom and will die 
if she cannot find the eight spirits that possess the power to cure her, 
explores a decaying, "Old" New York City, are truly thrilling and innovative 
in their presentation and Ross' recurring dream is rather chilling and 
manages to capture some subtle characteristics of real dreams–but both 
highlights get bogged down by the onslaught of idiocy that lies in Fantasy's 
narrative. 
       The "human" characters of Final Fantasy, including Dr. Ross' love 
interest (more or less Ben Affleck with Alec Baldwin's voice), are obviously 
computer-generated but have nonetheless stirred up some controversy about the 
future of real actors.  The characters don't quite have the nuances or 
gestures that humans do, but often, I found myself surprised at how real they 
appeared.  Although I hardly believe there'll ever be a point in time where 
the local AMC will feature mylars featuring the names of CGI movie stars, 
Fantasy can be praised for its exploiting of modern technology and what it's 
capable of.  
       Co-directors Motonori Sakakibara and Hirobonu Sakaguchi (also the game 
creator) chose to bring Fantasy to life utilizing the most complex and 
impressive CGI I've seen–but for what reason?  It doesn't take much to see 
the hollowness in the film's script (which Sakaguchi co-wrote with Al Reinert 
and Jeff Vintar) nor the cost ($135 million) and time (four years) it takes 
to utilize the technology Fantasy does.  Yes, a successfully filmed video 
game could be quite a revelation–but Fantasy only lives up to its potential 
in a visual respect.  A video game lets you experience, is equipped with 
adventure and suspense, allows you to relate and to interact.  And no, this 
isn't an impossible feat–the current Mummy series, under the direction of 
Stephen Sommers, pulls it off quite nicely.  Not to mention heavy re-writes, 
the filmmakers should have also considered letting real actors inhabit the 
film–at least when the script kills off the various, one-dimensional 
characters, you'd have Ben Affleck exerting some real human emotion while he 
watches his companions die (or as the film will have us believe, have the 
souls sucked violently out of them), as he did in Pearl Harbor, rather than a 
wooden look alike of him doing so.  Or, on second thought...

GRADE: C-

       Film reviewed July 23rd, 2001

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X-Language: en
X-RT-ReviewID: 275977
X-RT-TitleID: 1108683
X-RT-AuthorID: 1361
X-RT-RatingText: C-