#FINAL FANTASY THE SPIRITS WITHIN MOVIE#

Thus the heroine’s avuncular mentor (Donald Sutherland) warns his protégé (Ming-Na) not to voice their 'unpopular' ideas openly, ominously invoking the dreaded case of Galileo as an example of what happens to courageous scientists who boldly defend unpopular ideas in public. Where Gaias go when they die, though, is one of many mysteries the film doesn’t address.Įven fruitier than all this Gaia spirituality is the film’s conceit that the sensitively spiritual scientist-heroes who believe in it are liable to suffer persecution for their beliefs from an intolerant establishment. What happens when spirits for some reason don’t manage to return to their Gaia is a key point in the story.

'Everything has a spirit', from people to animals to plants, and at death these spirits 'return to Gaia,' enriching the whole with their individual memories and experiences. 'All life is born of Gaia,' we are told in the film. 'Gaia,' of course, was the name of mother Earth in classical pagan mythology, but in our day it’s become inextricably associated with New-Age eco-spirituality and neopaganism and Final Fantasy is rife with such pop mysticism. Even when the credits began rolling, I wasn’t clear whether the Zeus Cannon was incapable of destroying a Gaia after all, or whether it could only destroy the Earth Gaia but strengthened the alien Gaia, or what - to say nothing of why. Of this device we are variously told that (a) it can destroy the phantoms only at the cost of also destroying the 'spirit' of our own planet ('Gaia') (b) it has no effect at all on the alien presence and (c) it in fact strengthens the alien 'Gaia' (which we learn is also here on earth) each time it is used.

#FINAL FANTASY THE SPIRITS WITHIN MOVIE#

But in Final Fantasy the movie, we never entirely find out what’s going on.įor example, there’s a device in the movie called the 'Zeus Cannon,' designed to destroy alien 'phantoms' who, in the story’s post-apocalyptic setting, inhabit much of the earth.

To be sure, computer games don’t always spell out the rules for the player from the outset sometimes part of the point of the game is discovering the rules for oneself. Even basic rules and motivations never become clear. The heroes, though eye-poppingly rendered, remain emotionally as one-dimensional as any computer-game avatar. The sci-fi scavanger-hunt premise hasn’t been fleshed out into a coherent or satisfying story. (Another mediocre effort, Disney’s Dinosaur, isn’t fully computer-generated: Live-action locations and backgrounds were used.)īased on a computer game, Final Fantasy is always interesting to look at, and is sometimes visually spectacular, but it hasn’t transcended its gaming origins. The effect, although far from perfect, is nonetheless impressive, and sets a new standard for the medium.įinal Fantasy may also go down in history as the first genuinely bad computer-animated feature film. A Bug’s Life Toy Story 2 even Antz and Shrek… they may not all be to everyone’s tastes, and they may not all be appropriate for all audiences, but there’s not a bad film in the lot.įinal Fantasy: The Spirits Within has the distinction of being the first computer-animated feature film to achieve something approaching photorealism with a cast of non-cartoony human characters. In fact, computer-animated films generally have tended to be good - sometimes great. Fans of the still-new field of computer animation are fortunate that the first fully computer-rendered feature film, Pixar’s Toy Story, is a truly wonderful film.

Final fantasy the spirits within