Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

FINAL FANTASY: THE SPIRITS WITHIN

Rating: C

This story is, uh, strange. Which is a polite way of saying it's wacked out beyond belief. The year is 2065, and most of the earth has been rendered a virtual wasteland due to a huge meteor impact. That's basically the last thing I understood. Then there are these giant monsters called "phantoms," which rode in on the meteor, and attack the surviving humans at every opportunity. Most of the time the phantoms are invisible, except when they're not. Although they're supposed to be ghosts, small arms fire kills them. Meanwhile, the main characters are searching for eight "life spirits," which can reside in anything from a lowly plant to an organic battery. Once all the life spirits are gathered, the heroes plan to use them to project a "wave" which will destroy all the phantoms by destructive interference. Hopefully they can accomplish this before the maniacal army general succeeds in his wish to blast the meteor with the "Zeus cannon," and ruins the earth's "guya" in the process. Meanwhile, the lead character Aki (Ming-Na) has one of those insidious phantom things growing inside her, and it's either that or the midnight runs to Ben & Jerry's that cause her to have strange dreams all the time. I suspect this entire story must be in code, and the only reason none of it makes any sense is because we lack the secret decoder ring. Only in this case, the decoder ring apparently lies at the bottom of a box of hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Everything in this movie is computer-generated, including the people. For the most part, these are the most realistic humans to yet spring forth from a computer keyboard. There are still perceptible flaws in their movements, and for some strange reason their lips don't sync well with their words. There's also the problem that some of the actors' voices (e.g., Steve Buscemi) don't match very well with their appearances. But at the same time, I occasionally forgot I wasn't watching real people. Then they would move too mechanically, and I was jarred back to reality. The animators frequently try to mask the defects with low-key lighting, which not only is cheating but also gives every member of the audience a severe case of eye strain.

As good as the computer graphics are, the characters remain stubbornly lifeless. There is simply no emotional connection with the audience, such that scenes meant to be laced with drama and pathos instead evoke yawns. The poor characters also seem prone to the same visual clichés as their real-life counterparts: an attempt to leap onto a moving spaceship leaves the character hanging by his fingernails as surely as if he were in a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. Plus, a lot of the "production design" and situations are reminiscent of Aliens. Why go to the trouble of creating an all-CGI movie just to copy live-action films?

The end result is a film which initially inspires admiration for its visuals, but grows tiresome as the novelty wears off. Not helping matters is the aforementioned storyline, which appears to have been written by a coven of Wiccans and leads you to expect the characters to strip nude and start dancing around a tree at any moment. When the film draws to a close after slightly more than an hour and a half, you probably won't be anxious for the sequel.