Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within Review
by John Sylva (DeWyNGaLe AT aol DOT com)December 28th, 2001
THE PHANTOM MENACE
FINAL FANTASY: THE SPIRITS WITHIN (2001)
Reviewed by John Sylva
The cliche "style over substance" has fittingly been thrown at numerous pictures this year, but no film is more deserving of the title than Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the latest in the "chilling vision of the future" genre currently invading a multiplex near you. Applauded for its arresting visual sweep and realistic CGI human characters, Final Fantasy brings to life the popular Playstation game that's widely considered a standard for RPGs, or role-playing games, as they're called. The second video game adaptation of the summer (the other being the dismal Lara Croft: Tomb Raider), Fantasy offers plenty of eye-candy to keep the 12 year old kid in all of us in awe of the extraordinary visual landscapes, but absent is the innovation and adventurous spirit needed to successfully bring the game-overs, starts/stops and pauses to the big screen.
Life, death, dreams, souls–the potential to explore these concepts, for which there are no words to accurately describe, is endless with the advanced, state-of-the- art technology Fantasy withholds, but the attempts to capture a dream on film, to make a testament of life and death and to propose the meaning of a soul ultimately fail because, essentially, the film doesn't have any of these: there's no dreamy wonder in the meaning of central character Dr. Aki Ross' dreams (voiced by Ming-Na of ER), there's no life in the screenplay's ideas about life and death on earth and there's certainly no soul in the awkwardly plotted picture that takes place on post-apocalyptic Earth. Strikingly similar to this year's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence in its bold presentation of what it attempts to preach, Fantasy, unlike A.I., lacks meat around the bones: its paper-thin plot, in which alien phantom beasts roam Earth after their asteroid arrival, can bear no scrutiny or examination whatsoever without completely falling apart–the plot is merely an excuse to create truly stunning images that pose as something deeper, something grounded in humanity. Fantasy milks the idea of these radical phantoms for all they're worth, placing them wherever the film seems to reach a dead end or a point that the action seems to be slowing down. This, for the most part, is how the entire film feels: redundant and uncreative. Granted, some effective moments are thrown in here and there: the opening sequences, in which Dr. Ross, who's been infected by a phantom and will die if she cannot find the eight spirits that possess the power to cure her, explores a decaying, "Old" New York City, are truly thrilling and innovative in their presentation and Ross' recurring dream is rather chilling and manages to capture some subtle characteristics of real dreams–but both highlights get bogged down by the onslaught of idiocy that lies in Fantasy's narrative.
The "human" characters of Final Fantasy, including Dr. Ross' love interest (more or less Ben Affleck with Alec Baldwin's voice), are obviously computer-generated but have nonetheless stirred up some controversy about the future of real actors. The characters don't quite have the nuances or gestures that humans do, but often, I found myself surprised at how real they appeared. Although I hardly believe there'll ever be a point in time where the local AMC will feature mylars featuring the names of CGI movie stars, Fantasy can be praised for its exploiting of modern technology and what it's capable of.
Co-directors Motonori Sakakibara and Hirobonu Sakaguchi (also the game creator) chose to bring Fantasy to life utilizing the most complex and impressive CGI I've seen–but for what reason? It doesn't take much to see the hollowness in the film's script (which Sakaguchi co-wrote with Al Reinert and Jeff Vintar) nor the cost ($135 million) and time (four years) it takes to utilize the technology Fantasy does. Yes, a successfully filmed video game could be quite a revelation–but Fantasy only lives up to its potential in a visual respect. A video game lets you experience, is equipped with adventure and suspense, allows you to relate and to interact. And no, this isn't an impossible feat–the current Mummy series, under the direction of Stephen Sommers, pulls it off quite nicely. Not to mention heavy re-writes, the filmmakers should have also considered letting real actors inhabit the film–at least when the script kills off the various, one-dimensional characters, you'd have Ben Affleck exerting some real human emotion while he watches his companions die (or as the film will have us believe, have the souls sucked violently out of them), as he did in Pearl Harbor, rather than a wooden look alike of him doing so. Or, on second thought...
GRADE: C-
Film reviewed July 23rd, 2001
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