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

From: JoBlo <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 03:31:10 -0000

FINAL FANTASY
RATING: 5/10
 
For more reviews and movie wallpapers, visit http://www.joblo.com/
 
PLOT:
Set in a post-apocalyptic future, our planet has been invaded by phantom aliens.
Few humans remain, but a handful of them actually believe that they can survive
the invasion and reclaim the planet as their own. 
 
CRITIQUE:
Despite some pretty stunning human-looking computer generated characters,
imagery and action sequences, this film's bleak and murky vision, and somewhat
incomprehensible spiritual mumbo-jumbo storyline, just didn't do it for me. And
before any of you "gamers" knock my ass upside down, please note that I have
never played or seen the "game" version of FINAL FANTASY, so I'm basing my
review entirely upon what I saw on the big screen and nothing else. Anyway, back
to what I was saying...basically, the biggest problem that I had with this movie
wasn't the fact that it was produced entirely by computers (human characters et
al), but that I just didn't care all that much about any of the people in the
film, and even more importantly, that I didn't really care about any of the
gibberish that they kept babbling about ("we must find the 7th spirit in order
to..."). Although that might just be a personal thing with me. I know that a lot
of people enjoy these types of themes in movies, but to me, they get a little
annoying, especially when they're made even more complicated than they need to
be. For example, I'm not entirely sure that I understood what went down at the
end of this film, and that's never cool. But enough about my non-appreciation
for the story line, let's talk about what everyone should be talking about with
this film and those are its visuals!
 
I have to admit that most of this movie's computer-generated images looked great
on the big screen and were perfect for the world created within the script.
Unfortunately, the characters couldn't help but look computer-animated from time
to time, and that usually took me "out of it" for a while. I also had some
problems with the recognizable voices on some of the characters, like Alec
Baldwin's voice on a young man (who looked like Ben Affleck!), Steve Buscemi's
on a good-looking funnyman and James Woods. I really think that I would have
gotten more into these characters, had they used non-movie star voices (as the
lead character Aki, who was also the most developed character). On the whole,
the dialogue wasn't bad and the speech-to-mouth synching either (I'd heard
horror stories on both), but I have to admit that despite my general
appreciation for "darker" movies, I was really quite depressed by the end of
this flick. I mean, why doesn't anybody smile in this movie? There were a few
jokes here and there (thank God!), but on the whole, the entire vision,
storyline and demeanor of the characters was just very, very gloomy.
 
So I guess that I'm about half-and-half on this movie. I dug most of its amazing
visuals, appreciated the action scenes and some of the real-life qualities of
the characters (the old man with the beard looked life-life in almost every
scene...very impressive), but didn't get into the story about the spirits
invading earth, felt pulled out of the picture from time to time, whenever I
noticed the "computerness" of it all, and definitely didn't buy into any of its
"emotional" scenes (real-life actors needn't worry about computers replacing
them just yet, these actors didn't deliver the goods in any of their "money"
scenes). But on the whole, I do still admire the ambitiousness of this project,
respect its vision and certainly look forward to more ground-breaking stuff like
this in the future. But as a movie...well, it just didn't entertain me all that
much. Wait for the DVD. 
 
Where's JoBlo coming from?
A.I. (8/10) - Alien (9/10) - Aliens (10/10) - The Arrival (8/10) - Battlefield
Earth (7/10) - The Cell (8/10) - Dark City (9/10) - Mission to Mars (3/10) -
Titan A.E. (7/10) - Virus (5/10) - The X-Files (7/10)
 
Review Date: July 11, 2001
Director: Hironobu Sakaguchi
Writers: Al Reinert, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Jeff Vintar   
Producers: Jun Aida, Chris Lee, Akio Sakai  
Actors: Ming-Na as Aki Ross
Alec Baldwin as Gray Edwards
Donald Sutherland as Doctor Sid
Genre: Science-Fiction
Year of Release: 2001
------------------------------------ 
JoBlo's Movie Emporium
http://www.joblo.com/
------------------------------------
(c) 2001 Berge Garabedian

==========
X-RAMR-ID: 28822
X-Language: en
X-RT-ReviewID: 235436
X-RT-TitleID: 1108683
X-RT-SourceID: 573
X-RT-AuthorID: 1021
X-RT-RatingText: 5/10