Final Fantasy:
The Spirits Within

The animation is real, but the movie is not

	Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
	Starring the voices of Ming-Na, Alec Baldwin, Donald Sutherland and Peri Gilpin
	Written by Al Reinert and Jeff Vintar
	Directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi
	Columbia Pictures/Square Pictures
	Opens July 11
	PG-13

By Patrick Lee

ar in the future, Dr. Aki Ross (Ming-Na) is troubled by dreams of a harsh planet where alien armies clash at dawn. But the dreams are no less disturbing than Ross' reality: an Earth ravaged by an infection of alien phantoms that devour the souls of the living.

Pursuing a controversial theory of her mentor, Dr. Sid (Sutherland), Ross has entered the restricted no man's land of Manhattan. Though all life has long since perished here, Ross follows a mysterious signal indicating that at least one life form has survived.

It's a small plant, and its life force resonates at a particular frequency--one of eight that Dr. Sid and Ross believe hold the cure to the alien contagion. But before Ross can collect the sample, she is nearly consumed by the alien phantoms--huge, evanescent flying demons.

She is saved by the quick intervention of military Capt. Gray Edwards--her former lover--and his crack team of commandos--Ryan (Ving Rhames), Jane (Gilpin) and Neil (Steve Buscemi). Back in the protected Barrier City on Long Island, Ross must perform an emergency procedure on Gray to neutralize alien microbes that have infected him.

Hard-nosed military leader Gen. Hein (James Woods), meanwhile, is arguing before the ruling council that the only solution to the alien contagion is to fire the orbiting Zeus Cannon. Dr. Sid and Dr. Ross argue against it--and say if they can only gather the two remaining wave forms, they can create a wave that will eliminate the phantoms forever, without risking the destruction of Earth and its living spirit, Gaia.

The council is dubious, and Gen. Hein believes Ross may be unduly influenced by her own, contained alien infection. Guided by her increasingly detailed dreams, Ross joins Sid, aided by Gray and his team, to gather the remaining wave forms before Hein can exercise a nefarious plan to gain control of the situation.

The Spirits are willing, but ...

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is being touted as the first movie based on a video-game series that was developed and directed by the game's creator in the medium of the game, building on the spirit--if not the characters, stories or situations--of the games themselves.

The resulting film was four years in development, requiring the labors of about 200 international graphic artists, who gathered in Hawaii to create what the filmmakers call the first completely photo-realistic animated human characters in a feature film.

But for all the effort, the movie winds up feeling awfully generic, rife with war movie clichés and SF film conventions, not to mention characters that are a lot less credible than the computer animation used to bring them to life. More about that later.

The weakness begins and ends with the script, whose dialogue is painfully obvious and whose plot is overly complicated, yet completely predictable. Sakaguchi--who came up with the film's story--attempts to imbue the film with a kind of New Age spirituality akin to Star Wars' the Force, but it ends up sounding, as Gen. Hein says, like so much mumbo-jumbo to move the story along. Characterizations are sketchy at best, and the central relationship between Gray and Aki is as artificial as they are.

The film's strength, as might be expected, is in its visuals, especially the realization of a ruined Manhattan, the alien planet and the phantom menaces. Taking full advantage of animation's freedom, Sakaguchi moves the camera in impossible ways to heighten the excitement.

But the animation's strengths are, paradoxically, also its weaknesses. The animated humans are breathtaking at first glance, capturing the uneven skin tones, microscopic hairs, limpid eyes and gross movements of human beings in a way heretofore unimagined.

But the characters are so close to real that viewers are jarred by the instances in which they don't quite live up to reality. Mouth movements, in particular, seem out of whack, as if the characters are speaking a foreign language and have been dubbed. Most seriously, the characters' faces fail to convey real, subtle emotion, especially in scenes of anguish or sadness or passion.

Which raises the question: Why didn't filmmakers just shoot Final Fantasy as a live-action epic? There isn't much in the film that couldn't have been accomplished in live action, aided by CGI, and that hasn't been done before in films like Aliens and Starship Troopers and even Blade Runner. -- Patrick

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Also in this issue: The Chronicle, Lexx and Night Visions

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