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Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
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| Rated: PG-13 |
2001 |
Color |
Time |
| Starring:
Alec Baldwin, Steve Buscemi, Peri Gilpin, Matt McKenzie, Ming-Na, Ving Rhames, Donald Sutherland, James Woods, Annie Wu |
| Directed
by: Hironobu Sakaguchi |
| Written
by: Jeff Vintar, Al Reinert |
| Story
by: Hironobu Sakaguchi |
| Novelized
by: Dean Wesley Smith |
| Music:
Elliot Goldenthal |
| Movie
Co.: Chris Lee Productions, Square Co. Ltd. |
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Critique
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Reviews:
Style
vs. Substance - The Battle Rages On: Final
Fantasy – The Spirits Within
by Christian De Matteo
Wimpy
We live now, cinematically speaking, in a time of
technological flux.
“Movie Magic” is evolving at an astounding
rate, and like anytime that happens, we the audience are
getting flooded with the good, the bad, and
the ugly. The
eternal quandry of style over substance has never been
so obvious as it is now with visually stunning pieces of
inanity flooding the market.
How many movies leave you thinking, “Sure the
explosions were great, the special effects and CGI
excellent, but where’s the beef?”
Final Fantasy is the latest victim of what
exploded with The Phantom Menace debate. Here
we have an awe-inspiring display of the industry’s
latest eye candy, computer generated humans that come
very close to perfect imitation.
Eyebrows that rise, lips that purse and crease,
fingers that wrinkle at the joints.
Really the very best of the best of video game
animation. The
action is beautifully choreographed and the scenery is
something to behold.
BUT… where’s the plot.
The audience is simply dropped into the middle of
a massive, ongoing video game mythology—at least a
decade in the making—and given only a smattering of
an explanation as to what "Gaia" is, what the
"inner spirits" are, and what the hell is going on.
Standing on its own, the movie feels very
incomplete and full of holes.
Final
Fantasy is not a movie like The
Fast and the Furious that can survive without plot
because we’re just there to see cars blow up.
Fantasy
positions itself as a major sci-fi entry with a
mythology and as such needs to live up to that promise.
Instead, the first half sets up an intense and
complex plot that the film never lives up to, explains
or does anything but simply “resolve,” although the
audience doesn’t understand the full problem from the
get-go.
Basically,
the movie, complete with excellent voicing by Steve
Buscemi, Alec Baldwin, Ving Rhames and James Woods, and
incredible animation, is lost due to a wooden and cliché-ridden
script, cardboard cutout characters, an oftentimes
inexplicable story line and a severely lacking plot that
looses all steam for the entire last half culminating
with an ending that doesn’t seem like an ending at
all.
May
the future bring a merger of technology and intelligence
and not a culture of eye candy entertainment.
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Final
Fantasy: The Beginning of the End?
by Michael Flanagan
Solid
When watching Final Fantasy:
The Spirits Within, one is forced to explore the
possibility that one day in the very near future,
movies will not feature live action actors, but CGI
people, and CGI Worlds.
The star of tomorrow could be the voice actor,
bringing us, the collective audience, back to the age
of radio with visually assisted imaginations.
Movies will be able to show more and do more,
and do so better than they ever could before. And
we, said audience, will not be able to tell the
difference between that, and the real thing.
Sure, the scenario is an unlikely
one, but here’s the reality:
Final Fantasy proves that the proverbial
“they” can do it.
Characters in the film each have at the very
least a total of one minute of screen time in which
they look completely real. Dr. Sid, the aging scientist, looks the most impressive, with
his bald, liver spotted head and aging face resembling
an older, weaker Sean Connery.
Not resembling him like a cartoon resembling a
real actor, but like one actor resembling another.
The technology exists, and is constantly
improving. What
“they” can and will do with it, though, is far
more controversial.
Directors like Robert Zemeckis already use the
technology to alter actors’ facial expressions,
eyes, and gestures. With the improving technology, what’s stopping them from
creating digital versions of their actors?
Film a few scenes of a movie with Tom Hanks,
then send in his CGI-double, program some scenes, and
call Tom back in to do the ADR. It will happen. And
that will lead to the most legal-splitting headlines
since movies first had sound.
Unfortunately, that’s about all
Final Fantasy has to offer.
The movie itself is yet another case of “just
because we can doesn’t mean we should.”
Far too many scenes were stretched out as the
programmers showed off their new toys, a high-tech
“look what I can do” that made the average
American hour and twenty minute animated film into a
two-hour boring attempt.
The first half is extremely entertaining;
it’s both philosophical and fun.
The second half returns to its video game
roots, and it shows.
The villain becomes stereotypically maniacal,
the hero becomes burdensomely heroic, and the plot
becomes staged and clichéd.
Final Fantasy is a good
start to something that can benefit the world of film,
when done correctly. Before it does that, though, it has to overcome an abundance
of legal mumbo-jumbo and an extreme lack of plot.
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