The film was a big flop, one that shuttered the new film division of video game publisher Square almost in the same breath that it opened it, and very nearly wrecked the company's planned merger with fellow software company Enix, now wary of linking its fortunes to company with such a high-profile failure. This did not come even close to happening, and most of the aesthetic technique that The Spirits Within pioneered turned out to be an immediate dead end.
Final fantasy spirits within type movie#
Actually, that's much too small a way of putting the film's ambitions: The Spirits Within was meant to create a whole new paradigm in movie acting, creating in its main character a CG "actress" who would show up in film after film, both live-action and animated, who would come to feel like a real movie star in her own right. The idea behind it was to make the first photo-realistic CGI humans in feature-length cinema, six years after Toy Story birthed the fully-rendered CG feature by including hideous deformities where its human characters should have gone. The thing about The Spirits Within - which has absolutely no connection to the nine games in the main Final Fantasy series ( Final Fantasy X released just over a week after the film opened), nor any of that series' spin-offs, except for a character called Sid (though its spelled "Cid" in the English localisations of the games) - is that it was as much a proof of concept and technical exercise as it was an attempt to make a narrative film.
And the only reason it's so damn ugly is because it's so damn ambitious. Parts of it are as beautifully-designed and executed as anything in an animated feature from the 2000s. We cannot, for example, bluntly declare "it's an ugly movie", even though its ugliness is pervasive and surely the individually most important reason that it's also bad. It is a bad film that swings between the inordinately awful, the merely crummy, and even the genuinely good in a wild confusion. But it's not just bad, the way that other entries in its peculiarly benighted subgenre are, like Lara Croft: Tomb Raider or BloodRayne. The 2001 video game adaptation Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is a bad movie. A review requested by Ben Verschoor, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.
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