Film #051 - Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)
Viewed February 20, 2006
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is the film that brought down the mighty house of Square. Until making this film, Square was a highly respected and successful video game company, mostly on the strength of its “Final Fantasy” series of RPGs. The Spirits Within was to be their big crossover into the world of film. Square hoped to ride the excitement of CGI films like Toy Story (1995) with a highly realistic film that could show off their prowess and engage audiences. Ultimately, though, despite the depth of detail in The Spirits Within, it actually comes off as lifeless in story, character and performance.
The basic premise is about as deep as your average video game. The heroes are on a quest for eight “Spirits” that will allow them to revitalize Earth’s “Gaia” and dispel the “Phantoms” that roam the planet destroying all life that they touch. Pretty standard quasi-spiritual Japanese RPG stuff. This is where The Spirits Within has its biggest problems. Instead of utilizing this basic plot for an exciting, action film (with some focus on the spiritual aspects, perhaps), they instead steep everything in extremely simplistic good vs. bad, man vs. nature terms with only occasional visits to the realm of action. If they had focused on the search for the “Spirits”, they could have kept the film moving along at a good clip and allowed the deeper issues to flow out of the story naturally. But they focus instead on the pseudo-religion at the heart of the story, causing the film to get regularly bogged down in long, drawn out dialogue scenes that often rehash the same issues brought up before.
There is also a severe lack in the director’s chair. Hironobu Sakaguchi and co-director Moto Sakakibara tend to luxuriate over their virtual sets, ships and characters. They seem so caught up in the world they created that they can’t remember to tell a story or develop their characters or do anything that doesn’t seem to be just an excuse to show off their realistic CGI models.
And for all the money that Square’s rendering software cost, the CGI models end up being more liability than highlight. Certainly the scenery is well rendered and the ships (if a bit outlandishly designed) do seem realistic enough. But the vast majority of the people in the film move stiffly, with big, unnatural movements. The animation is barely improved over the average video game cut scene, even if the imagry has had a massive upgrade. The only character that really escapes this for some inexplicable reason is Dr. Cid (voiced by Donald Sutherland). Why this one character should be so subtly and well animated while everyone else clunks around is a mystery to me. All I can say is that if they had animated everyone else as well as Dr. Cid, I might be writing a very different review.
The voice acting is mostly fine (again it is Sutherland who really stands out), but there is little expression of character in the performances. Ming-Na voices the lead Dr. Aki Ross and shows a remarkable lack of inflection, speaking mostly in a simple, straightforward way. Alec Baldwin seems to be trying too hard, as if attempting to compensate for the fact that his character, Capt. Gray Edwards, looks a lot more like Ben Affleck than it does like Baldwin. Ving Rhames (Sgt. Ryan Whitaker), Steve Buscemi (Off. Neil Fleming) and Peri Gilpen (Off. Jane Proudfoot) have plenty of screentime, but portray cardboard cutout characters (the strongman, the wise-acre, the tough girl) and give nothing. James Woods, as the villainous General Hein is as one-note as they come, unable to eek out an iota of nuance from the stereotypical military madman part he is given.
There’s really nothing in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within to recommend it, unfortunately, since there was an opportunity here to really show what CGI was capable of. The movie’s diasastrous reception at the box office (domestically and abroad) put Square into severe financial distress and led eventually to their merging with rival RPG maker Enix only a few years later. I can’t say I feel sorry for them. Since the dawn of the PlayStation era, Square and companies like them have put an emphasis on visuals and eye candy, without keeping an eye towards the bottom line of making good product. The Spirits Within was only the most obvious example of the folly of that attitude and its resulting failure was well earned.