"mmmm....it feels warm", responds Dr. Sid as a chunk of earth Gaia floats through him.
As the movie slides into post-climax completion the only phrase that comes to my head is "WTF?". Now, overall the flic is good. Final Fantasy will definitely be remembered as a technical masterpiece of computer animation, but to call it a great movie would be going too far.
There is a little of everything in the movie that Square built. Action, love, intrigue, aliens, ghosts, alien ghosts, antagonists, protagonists, cool spaceships, dream flashbacks, token black character, big explosions, and poor dialogue. Ahh...the poor dialogue, what a tragic flaw in this would-be diamond of a film.
The stale chitchat intermingled with grandiloquent explanations makes the movie a verbal calamity. The conversation convulses from deep explanations of Gaia, the life-force of Earth, to cheap comedic causerie. But all is not lost because of the caustic confabulation. A team of 230 programmers and CGI artists are able to pull off a real eye-pleaser, with the help of SGI of course.
Seeing the future through the eyes of 175 Silicon Graphics boxes is a neat thing. The visual integrity of Final Fantasy is out-of-this-world. The realism and quality of the characters and scenes is so good that the self-questioning phrase "This is CGI?" is a constant companion throughout the movie. The action and storyline lend themselves to being rendered. The freaky alien-ghosts, Phantoms, could not have been portrayed any other way besides computer animation. The effects used to render them and their interaction with the characters would be an impossibility to conventional cinema. Lauded be the producers and writers for creating a story to take advantage of the computer animation platform.
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within will no doubt be remembered for widening the CGI cinema genre, but much to the dismay of Final Fantasy fanatics it will not go down as one of the greatest movies of all time.
And so as the beautifully rendered Aki carries off her dead boyfriend and watches a hawk fly through the mountains, the movie ends, and the juxtaposition of great computer animation and horrible interlocution makes my mind say "WTF?"