Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

 


Unleash a new reality

 

Darth Buzz

SCORE: 4

"Whoah, there Buzz." you say. "This is Sci-Fi and animated, and I know you love both, but you just gave FF a 4 and The Finger. What gives?"

Well let me tell you kids. This here is genuine SHIT. Let me start with the acting. It's total ass. It's like all the characters in this film are reading lines of dialogue but there is little interaction. As I'm watching the film I can imagine actors in sound recording booths recording their dialogue at 6:00 AM and they're sleepy and don't really care, and none of them are even in the same room together, or the same country for that mater. That's the only "real" feeling I got from this film. Not a single performance is noteworthy. The only thing that is noteworthy is that you got Alec Baldwin, Ving Rhames, Steve Buscemi, Donald Sutherland, and James Woods, and didn't manage to get a good performance. Aside from the voice acting the physical acting is none too good either. It looked like Night of the Living Dead. Facial expressions were stiff at best and body language was weak also. The action poses and movements were pretty good though. Overall though the acting was just horrible.

Next up to bat is the story. GAY! Stupid fucking story. One of the things I hate is when one of the driving characters of a film does things repeatedly that goes against all logic. General Hein who is the main villain of FF doesn't do a god damn thing in this film that makes sense. *** Here is your spoiler warning. *** The General ignores a scientist on what to do about a problem. The General intentionally lowers defense shields, endangering civilian lives, to start a fight. The General shoots the "aliens" with a space cannon and continues to even after it's obvious that this is making the "aliens" stronger. The General is a dick for no other reason than to be a dick. He is a pointless antagonist. In FF the whole earth spirits/Gaia thing kind of sucks. In Princess Mononoke the forest gods are kick ass. You get a big pig with worms coming out of him, and a giant thing with spines on his back that turns into a weird deer thing. Totally creative and cool. In FF we get glowing water. <extreme sarcasm> kick ass. <end of extreme sarcasm> There isn't really anything redeeming about the story.

On the pure animation CGI/FX side things are much better. Some of the scenes were amazing, and the characters when they were still would make you think, "that looks real," then the illusion would quickly disappear.  Even though the FX didn't convince me of any kind of realism I still like the style and look of the film.  Realism isn't everything.  (This film gets it's whole score based upon how the film looks.)

FF as a whole made me feel like I was watching an FX demo that was just going on WAY too long. I felt no attachment to any of the characters, the story, or anything else. It would have been a lot better if I could have watched the best 10 minutes of FF set to techno music or something but since it was 106 minutes instead, (and no techno music) I will have to give it a 4 and The Finger.