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Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. (2001) Cert 12. Director - Hironobu Sakaguchi Writer - Hironobu Sakaguchi Starring - Ming Na, Donald Sutherland, Ving Rhames, Alec Baldwin, James Woods & Steve Buscemi. |
Premise - Soul sucking aliens have invaded Earth of the future. Who can
stop them and return peace to the planet? Boasting none of the characters or locations from any of the nine Final
Fantasy games comes the first film from Square Pictures. It's hard to have
any strong feelings about Final Fantasy because the film is just so damn
average. I would have gone to 2, but the animation is really impressive. It's a
benchmark in that respect and should be seen for this reason alone.
I am a long time fan of the game series (Part 8 took up
120 hours of my life!) and have been looking forward to this film since I
saw early preview pictures in the media about a year ago.
The film
is certainly very impressive to look at. Although I haven't seen Shrek,
from what I have seen I can say that Final Fantasy makes Shrek look like a
Tom & Jerry cartoon. It is light years ahead in terms of animation
quality. Constantly throughout the movie you forget that it is animated
and start to believe these are real actors on the screen in front of you.
Only the odd bit of jerky movement or dodgy lip-synching reminds you that
these actors don't exist.
The voice talents are of a fantastic
standard, boasting some of my favourite support players, Donald
Sutherland, Ving Rhames, James Woods, Steve Buscemi and erm... Alec
Baldwin. Oh, well I suppose you can't have everything. Ming Na from ER
fame plays the films lead Dr Aki Ross.
The story is pretty hokey
and shows of the films computer game roots. Some new age gubbins about
using the spirit of the planet (it's Gia) to counteract an attacking alien
army. Rather than just letting James Woods blast them of the planet with
his space ray gun thing.
You can tell a game company produced the
movie as the villain is about as comic book as they come. And, since this
film is animated they can even make him look evil. Woods's character is
snivelling and underhand to an almost comical degree.
It's not a
total loss, I was entertained for the running time, but I felt strangely
empty afterwards.
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5/10 for Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Poster Quote - The final, Final
Fantasy? |