Review: Final Fantasy Movie

Review: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
The No-Name staff was lucky enough to attend a screening of Sony/Columbia's new Final Fantasy movie on July 9th, and here is a very brief review of it.

Warning! Possible spoilers ahead!

Matt Conner:
I was very impressed by the graphics, especially the realism of the faces. The way slight variations of color, as well as actual facial blemishes, were used made the people seem very real. Storyline: 6 Characterization: 8 (except the villain) Graphics: 9.5

Andy Kim:
The computer-generated graphics were good, and the story was solid, though with some weak moments. It was an intriguing mix of science-fiction and spiritual elements. Overall: 9

Robert Loo:
The movie was more than you expect, but less than you can hope for. While the CGI made the mecha and the creatures look great, it still needs a little more work to get all of the people to look and move right. Also the script could use a little more work, but the voice casting was great. Overall: 6.5

Trevor Menagh:
Square has really brought computer graphics to the next level with Final Fantasy, The Spirits Within. Graphically there were only a few flaws, I noticed that they didn't have any tears, which is a difficult thing to create, and some of the facial expressions do need some work to be more realistic, especially looks of pain and fear.

Besides those little squabbles the graphics were amazing, the people at times looked real. The mecha in the show was very impressively designed as well.

Now on to the not so great parts. The story left something to be desired, I have a feeling that this would have been a great RPG but it falls short of what I would call a great movie. You don't really have time to feel attached to any of the characters. Again I must say that if this were a Square game I think that it would be great, the plot is just the right size, so to say, for a good RPG, because you would have had longer to develop the characters. It's sort of like just watching the VMF clips of FF7 without playing the game.

The voice acting wasn't fantastic, but it was doable. As far as Japanese-made American-dubbed movies go though, I think they did a better job with Armitage III Polymatrix. In any case, it is worth watching at least once on the big screen. Storyline: 5 Graphics: 9 Overall: 6.5

Andrew Tei:
As a fan of the Final Fantasy, I was really looking forward to this Sprits Within. After watching it though, I was a little bit disaappointed in it. For me, it failed on quite a few levels.

Let's get to the graphics first. It's beautiful of course, and that's part of the problem. The dreamscape scenes in the movie and quite breathtaking, but when we go to scenes in the outside, it still feels like we're in a dream. The Zero G scenes though in the movie are excellent, as the removal of gravity gives the animator quite a bit of freedom.

The number of expressions on a character's face was quite limited. Sadness was impossible to portray, and extreme emotions of happiness and anger also couldn't be achieved. After seeing Shrek this year, I expected more, though I realize that a realistic human is much harder to replicate.

So with the range of emotions of the characters quite limited, we are left with the actors voice skills to get across points. And like the vast majority of dubs, it fails. I couldn't for even one second come to believe that Dr Aki Ross (Ming-Na) and Gray (Alec Baldwin) ever truly loved each other. Ming-Na played Wu in the Spawn cartoon, beautifully, so I don't understand how her performance her wasn't good. The marine squad is voice by Steve Buscemi, Ving Rhames, and Peri Gilpin. Buscemi and Rhames are very flat as they play the characters they are typecast into by Hollywood. Gilpin, who I love on Frasier, can't pull off the marine tough girl act that is so out of Aliens. Our villain is General Hein (James Woods) who is so two dimensional that's its scary. The writers put in one small scene to try to show his justifications for his "Kill Kill Kill" way of doing things that almost seemed like an afterthough. Give me Kefka from Final Fantasy 6.

Story? Plot? Well, the movie kinda drops us into a world on the brink of destruction, similar to after Kefka craps on the world in FF6. After giving us a nice action scene to draw us into the movie, followed by character introduction time, we get into our backstory. A meteor that landed on Earth has brought an alien infestation of phantoms that when contact is made with a human, results in the spirit of the human being removed. Humans are forced to live in cities surround by bio-ethereal barriers to keep out the phantoms. Agressive attacks against the phantom aliens have failed, so Dr Ross, with Dr Sid (Donald Sutherland) have come up with a Gaia Theory of Earth, similar to the Life Stream of Final Fantasy 7. The aliens are not compatible with Earth's Gaia, and the good doctors hope to fix this by finding 8 spirits that will enable the phantoms to be changed. It's all very Zen :)

So the whole movie was very game like. Random encounters, boss battle, story, repeat. My problem was I guess in what I was expecting from the movie. I was certainly expecting more action, and not as much as try have the character communicate with each other and try to get a point across, which they did poorly. They would try to explain things to a point, and expect the audience to fill in the rest. If you were familar with Final Fantasy games, you could, but I expect lots of people to be in the dark. This is Square's second attempt at a something film like if you count the Final Fantasy OVA, another disaster. Square should stick to video games and get out of movies as soon as possible.

Warner Young:
The Final Fantasy movie has an interesting, though somewhat unoriginal, premise. Aliens, in the form of "phantoms", invaded the Earth 30 years ago from an asteroid that crashed on the surface. These phantoms can travel through walls, and are normally invisible without special optical gear. They can also kill people by ripping out the "bio-etheric energy" of a person; essentially the person's soul. Earth's inhabitants now live in cities protected by energy barriers, and it seems as though humanity is slowly losing the fight.

The movie has a nice classic opening, with the main character in a mysterious situation, that provokes your interest and makes you want to know what's going on. The story does weaken somewhat after a dramatic opening, as our heroine, Dr. Aki Ross (Ming-Na), is reunited with her old love, Gray (Alec Baldwin), who happens to lead the squad of marines sent in to rescue her. Particularly bad is the two-dimensional villain, General Hein (James Woods), who's bent on using military power (in the form of the Zeus Cannon) to destroy the asteroid impact crater, where most of the phantoms are still buried. Dr. Ross, and her mentor Dr. Sid (Donald Sutherland), are working on an energy-based defense to convert the alien phantoms to something more compatible with the spirit of Gaia, because they believe a force-based attack by the military may be more damaging to the Earth.

Without giving away the whole movie, suffice to say that much of the rest of it plays out like bits from Aliens and, in the case of the evil general, vaguely like Dr. Strangelove. The main character's dialogue is quite good, but many of the secondary characters tended to have very cliché lines. This isn't necessarily bad, because most of it is still very enjoyable, and the computer-generated graphics are simply amazing. However, the evil general ends up a very flat character. There is a bit of characterization thrown in to explain his actions, but it doesn't really serve to save the character from being a cookie-cutter villain. There was also some unintentionally funny dialogue that I think probably would have sounded better in Japanese. Ultimately, I still enjoyed it. Storyline: 6 Graphics: 9 Overall: 7.5