Movies: Final Fantasy - The Spirits Within

For the longest time, video games needed no story besides a few bare lines of text. From Pong to Super Mario - heck, even through the first "Final Fantasy" - game developers paid more attention to sprite sizes than to plot. That all started changing around the 16-bit era, and nowadays games have production values rivaling Hollywood movies. "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" shows that video game writing still has a long way to go, though:



In "The Spirits Within," the Earth has been nearly destroyed by Phantoms, mysterious ghostlike creatures that can completely pass through inanimate objects. The Phantoms' touch is lethal to normal life, however, and the remnants of humanity huddle in protected barrier cities. When the film begins, scientist Aki Ross is desperately searching for a way to neutralize the invaders once and for all.

If you took the film and divided it up into cutscenes spliced between fifteen minute segments of gameplay, it'd make for a decent sci-fi RPG, I suppose. But as a two hour feature, the whole effort falls flat. The pacing is awful, the characters are hackneyed, and even the story itself unnecessarily exhibits some video game characteristics (the completely unnecessary second act). When the ending finally comes, it's more a relief than a revelation.

The movie was directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi, director and producer of the classic "Final Fantasy" series of video games. This is equivalent to the Yankees entering a cricket league and getting their clock cleaned - just a different arena, folks. Fun fact: "The Spirits Within" is entirely CGI, and is consequently one of the most expensive box office bombs in the history of cinema.

Rating: 4/10