Final fantasy: spirits within (2001)

[baumer]

Discuss

[Mango]

Man... fuck this movie.

[Ajipon]

I remembered the excitement when it was coming out. I remembered the sting of disappointment this movie delivered. Crap.

[cookie]

The Final Fantasy movie that has almost nothing to do with Final Fantasy made by the people behind Final Fantasy.

[Plain Old Tele]

Mildly interesting for the first 10 minutes or so, just in terms of a VFX reel. Then, sheer boredom. Terrible movie.

[baumer]

Written in 2001

 

 About a month and a half before this film came out, there was a plethora of commercials for it. I took one look at the trailer for the movie and said to myself, that this was going to fail and fail miserably. To me it looked like a cross between Aliens and T-2. The commercial and the trailer even went so far as to rip off some direct shots from Aliens and plot devices from T-2. If that was what the film was going to be about then there is no way it was going to succeed. People are stupid sometimes but not all of the time and anyone could see that this film was priding itself on the fact that it was the first film to be filmed completely on a computer. Great, but what they forgot was that the story was nothing that we haven't seen before. Here is the premise, a bunch of renegade soldiers are sent to a planet to stop a bunch of aliens or creatures from ruining what is left of Earth. You have a Linda Hamilton clone from T-2. You have every one of the important characters from Aliens basically cloned right down to Alec Baldwin playing Hicks, Buscemi playing Hudson and Terri Gilpin playing Vasquez. There was not one original idea in here so all they had to go on was the fact that they were computer animated and that they were one of the biggest video games around. 

There are many reasons why Final Fantasy failed. One of them is that the film just plain sucked. I took my 8 year old step son to see the film and he is big fan of the video game. He hated it as well. And he was a big fan of the game.

To sum it up, we were both confused by what was happening, unamused at the humour and generally had no interest in the story or what was going on in this fictional world. When we left, my stepson turned to me and asked me if I liked it? I replied no. He then began asking me questions hoping I could explain the plot to him. But this time, it was me asking him more questions as well, hoping that his knowledge of the video game could help me comprehend what we just spent my twenty bucks on. But to no avail.

Final Fantasy was destined to fail when they made it look like Aliens, T2 and the Abyss. James Cameron should actually sue them for whatever money they are going to make off this film because there is not a single line in this film that doesn't seem to come from James' vernacular. When films try to sell you on a gimmick, and not the actual film itself, then they are, in my opinion, destined for failure. When Toy Story was launched, it included box office heavyweights like Tom Hanks and Tim Allen. And they were not telling us to see this movie because it was stop computer animation. They were selling us on the story and the actors. Final Fantasy did the complete opposite. The tag line wasn't even about the movie itself, it was about their break-through in computer graphics.

UNLEASH A NEW REALITY.

This should be a tag line for the new Microsoft 1.21 gigawats time machine or something, but not a tag line for a film. This 120 million dollar effort deserved to fail and Square pictures should now go back to the drawing board and try to fix (in a hurry ) what they did wrong here. 

0.5 out of 10--That being for Buscemi and Rhames supplying the voices of the soldiers. I hope they made a lot of money doing this abomination.

One good thing did come out of this--and that was that Mason had to eat crow and admit that he was wrong. He also owes me a movie, and I'll be sure to collec

[Lordmandeep]

Final Fantasy Advent Children is much better and is real fan service to FF fans. 

[Goffe]

The very definition of meh. The story is quite interesting but the execution is amateurish and cliche. 5 years ago, I thought the animation was stunning, now it's just awful. Downgrading from B (75) to C- (45)

[Goffe]

also, how this got made in 2001? I mean, what executive would greenlight a 130m dark animation such as this?

Edited April 22, 2014 by Goffe Rises

[cookie]

also, how this got made in 2001? I mean, what executive would greenlight 130m dark animation such as this?

 

If rumors are to be believed it was supposed to cost half as much as it did ($70m).

[4815162342]

Final Fantasy Advent Children is much better and is real fan service to FF fans. 

 

Having never played the game it is a sequel to, I had no idea what was going on at all. It looked pretty though.

[MrPink]

Having never played the game it is a sequel to, I had no idea what was going on at all. It looked pretty though.

 

I played the game and I STILL had no idea what was going on

[Mango]

I played the game and I STILL had no idea what was going on

This. Spirits Within is really Final Fantasy in name only. Its sad. Most of the games (especially the older ones) actually have some really great and well crafted stories and plots they could have based this on.

[Lordmandeep]

FFX, 7 and 8 are best in story. 

[4815162342]

Never played any, but I've heard that 6 is the best from those I know who have.

[eXtacy]

I enjoyed it, had some pretty cool moments. Overall an average film

[cookie]

Man the CG in this hasn't aged well... A PS4 could render it better today.

Edited August 20, 2017 by cookie

[dxmatrixdt]

I've rewatched this and Doom like 4 times each expecting it to blow me away somehow like ive never seen it before.

 

Edited May 7, 2018 by Thematrixfilm