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

From: Eugene Novikov <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 06 Aug 2001 19:48:33 -0000

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)
Reviewed by Eugene Novikov
http://www.ultimate-movie.com/

Featuring the voice talents of Ming-Na, Ving Rhames,
Alec Baldwin, Steve Buscemi, Peri Gilpin, Donald
Sutherland, James Woods. Directed by Hironobu
Sakaguchi. Rated PG-13.

Are computer-animated actors bound to replace Julia
Roberts, Bruce Willis and the rest of their
flesh-and-blood kin? Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
makes the first convincing case for the affirmative.
While none of the "actors" here can not yet be
mistaken for a human being, this is easily the most
impressive CGI on display in a completely animated
motion picture. The word "cartoon" will soon become
extinct.

The plot concerns the adventures of Dr. Aki Ross
(voice of Ming-Na, who, a couple of years back,
brought the title character in Disney's Mulan to
life), a scientist who believes in the Gaia theory.
The film's version of Gaia involves 8 spirits, each
contained in a different life form somewhere on earth.
Earth, unfortunately, is being invaded by aliens
called Phantoms, who landed on a crashed meteor. To
kill the Phantoms, Ross needs to collect all eight
spirits, and use them to create some sort of wave that
will cancel out the Phantoms' life force.

The villain is a vigilante general who doesn't believe
in all this Gaia mumbo-jumbo, and whose elaborate
strategy for defeating the aliens consists of blowing
them all to smithereens using some futuristic version
of a nuke. So Ross teams up with a group of army
officers sent to protect her to find the 7th and 8th
spirits before the evil general can use his death ray,
which will only make matters worse.

Final Fantasy is based on a video game, but the movie
is by no means unaccessable to someone who has never
picked up the controls of a Playstation. The story is
actually quite easy to follow; it's also not very
interesting, as often happens with movies that pay
more attention to technical wizardry than to plot. The
science fiction here is like something out of a
second-rate Japanese anime, completely run-of-the-mill
and unaware of its own absurdity.

But no matter. I had no problems spending the 100-some
minutes simply looking at the pictures, which are even
more astounding than the trailer made them look. The
film plays like a window into a parallel universe
rather than a work of animation. The characters aren't
quite human-looking, and yet they are, with their hair
bouncing and waving in the wind, and their flesh
looking like you can reach over and touch it.

What's the point? Why go to such pains to create an
artificial reality when you can simply film with real
actors? Animation allows artists to truly create their
own world, almost unaffected by the budget constraints
that would otherwise plague a filmmaker. This is why
you're hard-pressed to find a CGI animated version of
You Can Count on Me: it would be a pointless exercise
in showing off. Final Fantasy, as well as some of the
summer's other animated flicks, use their
breakthroughs in graphics to achieve the fantastic.

When this spectacular technology finds a visionary --
John Lasseter, perhaps? -- with a story to tell as
well as pictures to show, we will be in for something
truly incredible. This has not happened yet. Final
Fantasy works better as a 2-hour demo reel than as
movie, a showcase of what we can do and what we can do
better. 

Grade: B

Up Next: Legally Blonde

©2001 Eugene Novikov

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