Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

The Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within Store

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Movie Stills:

Style vs. Substance - The Battle Rages On: Final Fantasy – The Spirits Within
by Christian De Matteo

Wimpy

            We live now, cinematically speaking, in a time of technological flux.  “Movie Magic” is evolving at an astounding rate, and like anytime that happens, we the audience are getting flooded with the good, the bad, and the ugly.  The eternal quandry of style over substance has never been so obvious as it is now with visually stunning pieces of inanity flooding the market.  How many movies leave you thinking, “Sure the explosions were great, the special effects and CGI excellent, but where’s the beef?”

            Final Fantasy is the latest victim of what exploded with The Phantom Menace debate.  Here we have an awe-inspiring display of the industry’s latest eye candy, computer generated humans that come very close to perfect imitation.  Eyebrows that rise, lips that purse and crease, fingers that wrinkle at the joints.  Really the very best of the best of video game animation.  The action is beautifully choreographed and the scenery is something to behold.

            BUT… where’s the plot.  The audience is simply dropped into the middle of a massive, ongoing video game mythology—at least a decade in the making—and given only a smattering of an explanation as to what "Gaia"  is, what the "inner spirits" are, and what the hell is going on.  Standing on its own, the movie feels very incomplete and full of holes.

            Final Fantasy is not a movie like The Fast and the Furious that can survive without plot because we’re just there to see cars blow up.  Fantasy positions itself as a major sci-fi entry with a mythology and as such needs to live up to that promise.  Instead, the first half sets up an intense and complex plot that the film never lives up to, explains or does anything but simply “resolve,” although the audience doesn’t understand the full problem from the get-go.

Basically, the movie, complete with excellent voicing by Steve Buscemi, Alec Baldwin, Ving Rhames and James Woods, and incredible animation, is lost due to a wooden and cliché-ridden script, cardboard cutout characters, an oftentimes inexplicable story line and a severely lacking plot that looses all steam for the entire last half culminating with an ending that doesn’t seem like an ending at all.

May the future bring a merger of technology and intelligence and not a culture of eye candy entertainment.

Final Fantasy: The Beginning of the End?
by Michael Flanagan

Solid

When watching Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, one is forced to explore the possibility that one day in the very near future, movies will not feature live action actors, but CGI people, and CGI Worlds.  The star of tomorrow could be the voice actor, bringing us, the collective audience, back to the age of radio with visually assisted imaginations.  Movies will be able to show more and do more, and do so better than they ever could before.  And we, said audience, will not be able to tell the difference between that, and the real thing.

Sure, the scenario is an unlikely one, but here’s the reality:  Final Fantasy proves that the proverbial “they” can do it.  Characters in the film each have at the very least a total of one minute of screen time in which they look completely real.  Dr. Sid, the aging scientist, looks the most impressive, with his bald, liver spotted head and aging face resembling an older, weaker Sean Connery.  Not resembling him like a cartoon resembling a real actor, but like one actor resembling another.  The technology exists, and is constantly improving.  What “they” can and will do with it, though, is far more controversial.  Directors like Robert Zemeckis already use the technology to alter actors’ facial expressions, eyes, and gestures.  With the improving technology, what’s stopping them from creating digital versions of their actors?  Film a few scenes of a movie with Tom Hanks, then send in his CGI-double, program some scenes, and call Tom back in to do the ADR.  It will happen.  And that will lead to the most legal-splitting headlines since movies first had sound.

Unfortunately, that’s about all Final Fantasy has to offer.  The movie itself is yet another case of “just because we can doesn’t mean we should.”  Far too many scenes were stretched out as the programmers showed off their new toys, a high-tech “look what I can do” that made the average American hour and twenty minute animated film into a two-hour boring attempt.  The first half is extremely entertaining; it’s both philosophical and fun.  The second half returns to its video game roots, and it shows.  The villain becomes stereotypically maniacal, the hero becomes burdensomely heroic, and the plot becomes staged and clichéd.

Final Fantasy is a good start to something that can benefit the world of film, when done correctly.  Before it does that, though, it has to overcome an abundance of legal mumbo-jumbo and an extreme lack of plot.

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