Too many spirits... (Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (DVD))

Member Name: zOOm

Product:	Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (DVD)
Date:	27/08/01 (55 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: First ever digital movie, reasonably good

Disadvantages: digital actors not "real enough" yet, the story is complicated

This movie was fairly hyped up in the press for the technology it uses. This happens to be the first ever movie that is completely computer generated. There are no actors, except for those doing the voice-overs. This is actually the reason I wanted to watch this movie.

The story is sort of a mix between “Alien” and “Starship Troopers”. It is based around spirits which is what I have come to expect from the Japanese. I like watching Japanese cartoons (Manga is the most popular type) and almost every single one of them include spirits in one way or another.

General (no spoilers)

As I said, the movie does not include any real actors and everything is computer generated. Hence, you can guess that special effects are excellent (well, I guess the whole movie is one big special effects). The setting is quite far in the future and the technology is amazing. There are helicopters that look like dragon flies and soldiers wear strange armour. But why do soldiers still carry knives???

What about humans? Amazingly enough humans look pretty realistic when you see them close-up. However, when they are moving around, the movements are unnatural (mainly slower then they would normally be) and even though their bodies are proportionate and the features are quite detailed, they still do not look very real. Interestingly enough I found that the main character, a woman, is the worst one. They seemed to have done a better job drawing the men.

I didn’t notice too much of the sound track, except for the last song, which was too tied in with the movie (you know, sort of like James Bond songs).

Quite clearly Seiko was one of the advertisers in the movie. There was another one but I can’t remember now. Product placement in a computerised movie….

The story follows Dr Aki (the woman I mentioned earlier). She keeps having strange dreams and cannot make out what they are. A meteorite had cra
shed into earth 34 years ago (from the date in the movie of course), and there are strange life-forms in the meteorite that kill humans. Not many of our weapons are good against them and attacking them has been pretty fruitless so far. Hence, Dr Aki and her colleague are looking for another solution. Captain Grey is with the US Army and decides to help Dr Aki in her quest, along with his “men”.

The story is a little complicated which might confuse your children (the movie is rated PG). The script writers have tried to introduce some humour into the movie in the form of a wise cracking soldier, but unfortunately it fails miserably.

I also found it strange that spirits are portrayed as spiders? flying dgragons? other insects? The characters should not be seeing the spirits without special equipment, but sometimes they do. There are other incosistencies in the script.

You just watch the whole story as if it’s something that your lecturer is telling you about in a history class and you cannot possibly get excited about it. (My wife actually slept through some of it!)


Spoiler section (for those that are really curious)
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The life-forms in the meteorite are called “phantoms”. This is because no one can see them with the naked eye, yet, they kill humans by taking the spirit away from the body – hence leaving the body lifeless. New York and other major US cities have been destroyed and humans live in special protected areas where an energy barrier blocks the phantoms from getting in.

Phantoms also have the ability to “infect” a person. Once a person is infected, it is only a matter of time before the phantom grows inside that person and kills them. Dr Aki was infected, but her phantom has been contained inside her by 6 of the 8 spirits. Still, she has dreams. Dreams that she cannot understand, but believes are a message from the ph
antom within her.

Dr Aki and her colleagues believe that everything has a spirit (they call it Gaya). Earth has a Gaya. When a new life form is born, Gaya gives it a spirit. The spirit travels with that life-form (a human, bird, insect, etc.) and returns to Gaya once its journey comes to an end and the physical body is dead.

They think that getting the 8 spirits together (they never tell us why 8) and getting the resulting waveform in contact with the phantoms will get rid of all the phantoms. At the start of the movie they already have 6 of the spirits, so they need to find the other 2.

However, a General in the army doesn’t share their view. He wants to fire the Zeus Canon! This is a huge laser canon built in space that should have the power to destroy the phantoms. Dr Aki and her colleagues claim that this canon will destroy Earth’s Gaya, and they don’t want it fired.

I’ll leave it up to you to find out the rest.

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The movie is about an hour and a half long and I have to admit it’s not for everybody. You’d have to be a real sci-fi fan or a real fan of the Final Fantasy game series to enjoy this movie. I only watched it to judge whether it was time we got rid of some of those bad actors, but unfortunately not yet… still, this is a huge step towards movies without actors. Which doesn’t mean they will be better movies, it’s just that they will be cheaper movies….

Summary: