|
Purely because it only takes 110 minutes to get through as opposed to 40+ hours, I planned on doing this ages ago, but I was never able to find a rental copy, and I'm certainly not going to pay full price for this when movies I actually like continue to elude my clutches. I eventually found an ex-rental VHS copy for $1.95. I also bought Kazaam.
STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE BLAH BLAH BLAH
One of the two scenes where the film remembers it's CGI. You can go home now.
|
The Spirits Within was a movie made entirely of computer-generated effects which arrived at a time when, in the wake of The Phantom Menace, it was really hip to hate computer-generated effects. Instead of being treated like an animated movie - which it was - it was instead treated like a live-action movie where the evil special-effects had gone out of control and taken over, replacing everything, including the actors. Instead of a visionary, ambitious technical achievement, it was emblematic of style over substance, a lack of humanity, and indulgent technical excess. "Style over substance" is, incidentally, one of the most ridiculous criticisms its possible to level at a film, since if a film works, it works because of its style, regardless of how ostentatious it may seem.
Thing is, The Spirits Within isn't sure if it's animated or live-action either. They had the technology and budget to create literally anything on screen, and chose to create... Space Marines vs. Monsters in a dystopic, post-apocalyptic future. OK, we could probably have set our sights a little high-- Oh, wait, there's a twist! See, one of them is a tough chick, one of them is weasely and sarcastic, and there's also... a black guy! OK, never mind. Aside from a grand total of about five minutes of characters floating in zero-gravity, there's nothing here that exploits even the tiniest fraction of the available technology. It's like if Fantasia had been a turtle playing the ukulele for two hours. What really shows it up is that if you were to grab a random CGI sequence from the actual series of games, chances are, even if it isn't up to the same technical standard, it'll be infinitely more imaginative and exciting. Look, a giant monster made of crystal, smashing its way out of a meteorite crater! An army of dragons flying to Earth from the moon! The entire solar system being destroyed multiple times for no apparent reason! A castle comes to life and turns into a giant robot! This is the sort of stuff that made people say "Wow, we like these games, even if the task of playing them is fairly dull and repetitive". Instead of creating images like this, The Spirits Within is material that could have been shot live in an abandoned factory in Prague with exterior filming in the Utah desert, special effects no more advanced than any other big sci-fi movie that year, and the real Ben Affleck. It would probably have cost less.
YES, BUT IS IT A GOOD MOVIE?
"...and I say we spend another billion dollars to look for a very special duck"
|
Kinda. OK, it's not that good, but it's also not any worse than most other expensive sci-fi movies, and certainly better than most other video game movies. Having Sakaguchi as a director is a good move, because he isn't obsessed with trying to make it look like a music video like certain Paul WS Andersons I could mention. He builds up atmosphere and gives the story room to breathe, which is nice because the actual story isn't that bad, even if the dialogue, pacing, underlying logic and characters are rubbish. Like the Star Wars prequels. The idea that the invading aliens turn out to actually be a load of frightened ghosts who can only be stopped by using the mean average of Earth's life-force to cancel them out is a more interesting premise than them simply being invading aliens who have to be shot at, but its also mishandled horribly by the literary genius who would later bring us that appalling adaptation of I, Robot. What the hell the titular spirits ARE is never explained - it's said by Aki that everything on Earth has a spirit, but for some reason only a certain bird / plant / dying child is suitable because... Why? Did Cid really come to this conclusion just because he was a fan of the Gaia Theory and thought it would be a good idea to spend massive amounts of public money seeing if it was true while the last surviving humans were under attack from aliens? Is being 'infected' by a phantom the same as being consumed, or are they two different modes of attack? What does being 'infected' by a phantom actually accomplish, since the phantoms are basically just wandering around senselessly eating things? How can they sometimes be detected, but sometimes not be detected? If people can build a barrier that keeps them out, why not build it around the meteor they're coming out of?
This makes it impossible to care about whether Aki & Cid's plan will work, as it doesn't make any coherent sense. We're supposed to be rooting for them in the face of the unsympathetic council and the warmongering military commander, but their plan is a load of pseudo-spiritual gobbledygook with nothing to back it up besides "Bio-Etheric waves". The only reason we know they're right is that the guy they're arguing against is so clearly meant to be bad - he's trigger-happy, dressed in black, gesticulates madly and uses every possible "Do you really expect us to believe this crazy scheme of yours will work?" sci-fi cliche this side of Ed Wood. Speaking of cliches:
Gray: "We're not gonna make it..."
Aki: "We're gonna make it!"
Gray: "We both know... that isn't true..."
Aki: "Gray..."
Gray: "Listen to me... You saved my life once... Now I want you... to save... yourself..."
Aki: "Don't leave me, Gray!"
Gray: "You've always been telling me that death isn't the end. Don't back out on me... now that I finally... believe..."
(CUE SOARING STRINGS)
Yes. Mmm. It's no worse than the attempts at romance in the actual games, but it seems so much worse when someone's actually saying the lines. Same deal with the name "Cid" - it looks fine when rendered in text, but people repeatedly talking about "Doctor Sid" makes it seem like we're in a Monty Python sketch.
SYNTHESPIANS (INSERT LESS OBVIOUS HEADING LATER)
Fig. 1: Impressive Hair.
|
I took the CGI characters for granted, as I imagine most people who were into video games at the time did. OK, maybe I didn't take them for granted as such, but anyone who played FF7 and FF8 (or, perhaps, seen The Phantom Menace) prior to seeing The Spirits Within is not going to be floored by its technical wizardry - yes, it was far superior to the CGI sequences in FF8, but those sequences were light-years ahead of FF7. FF7 looked like a Thunderbirds episode and randomly switched between attempted realism and big head mode; FF8 had characters that, while still a bit too shiny, at least looked like CGI representations of human beings rather than CGI representations of marionettes representing human beings. When we got to The Spirits Within and, check it out, Aki's hair has more polygons than FF7 and FF8 combined, it just seemed like the next logical step rather than a revolution. This, ironically, means that Final Fantasy / Video Game / Anime fans are the people least likely to be impressed by it, while people who aren't into any of those things probably aren't going to bother with it. We're officially jaded to the idea that a movie featuring realistic human characters can be created entirely inside a computer. It's not our fault, honest.
We're jaded to the idea, anyway, even though it hasn't happened, because The Spirits Within's characters are only about 90% realistic, which is too realistic to be cute in a cartoony way, but not realistic enough to stop them looking like zombies who fell in a vat of flesh-coloured paint. They all have a vacant, drugged-out stare and the skin on their faces doesn't quite move the same way as when living people talk, which makes them look like those fake celebrity interviews that Conan O'Brien does. Aki's hair looks amazing, but it soon becomes apparent that everyone else either has a crew cut, a helmet, or is bald. The bodily movements are stiff, but this isn't really the problem so much as the fact the vocal performances don't quite match what's on screen. A character will violently shove another aside and then berate them using the tone of voice that makes it sound like they're ordering chips. The only character who comes across as 'right' is James Woods as General Hein, because his vocal performance is as overplayed as his character's mannerisms, and he talks at people rather than to them - none of the character interaction really works because the on-screen characters have no physical chemistry and the voice actors all sound like they were recorded in separate studios using a guide-track. They even manage to somehow make Steve Buschemi boring, a feat which was impossible without the aid of cutting-edge 21st century technology. On the plus side, none of them are as repulsive as Lara Croft.
Fig. 2: No Hair.
|
Of course, all this is obvious now, because we've had five years to think about it and discuss what did and didn't work. Sakaguchi & Co were doing something nobody else had done before and forced to make it up as they went along. It's an FF8 situation where a bunch of new ideas didn't quite gel, rather than an FF9 situation where they just shat out some cynical garbage to make money. It's better than FF8, though, because it's 33 hours shorter and there's no junction system.
It's a brave, experimental, technically amazing film saddled with a lazy, brainless script that doesn't even try to exploit the medium's potential at all, so the end result is neither especially good or especially bad. It's better than Armageddon, The Chronicles of Riddick, Resident Evil, Doom, Alien vs. Predator and countless other sci-fi / video game-based wastes of celluloid, but it doesn't soar, either. A year later they released a game that began with zero-gravity underwater soccer being played while an otherworldly city is destroyed by a giant time-traveling lobster - wouldn't people have rather watched something like this than Starship Troopers 2: This Time They're Orange? Was nobody there to say "Hang on, maybe we should do something more interesting with this", or was it a Barret-style attempt to appeal to a North American demographic? Either way, it didn't work.
It probably didn't deserve to bankrupt Square Pictures and get Hironobu Sakaguchi sacked, but I'm glad I only spent $1.95 on it.
| ANTHONY R WOMBLE REMEMBERS... |
It is tempting to blame the average lack of intelligence and closed mindedness of the American people for the failure of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, but I have resolutely never taken the easy way out, and choose to blame the medium of film itself. It is simply an inferior storytelling medium to RPGs, unless the film is Anime, which The Spirits Within was most certainly not, as it was animated in Hawaii. While the deaths of the characters in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within were handled with great subtlety and I will admit shedding a tear at the demise of Neil, they did not reverberate with emotion and pathos in the way that Galuf heroically sacrificing himself to stop a tree from another dimension did in Final Fantasy V. While Hein was an excellently developed character with a convincing motivation for wanting to destroy the earth with an orbiting laser, but then I think of Sephiroth, think of how much of the game I spent entranced by him and his story, think of all the time I spend obsessing over him, think of how many tortured hours I've spent writing pages and pages of fanfiction dedicated to the one winged angel. I listened to the Breath of Fire 3 soundtrack while meditating on just why this was, and came to the following objectively correct conclusion: Because RPGs are forty times longer than movies, they logically possess forty times as much character development and forty times as many plot twists, the foundation of good storytelling regardless of what the screenplay 'gurus' say. I am presently attempting to get a team together to create an RPG based on Schindler's List, as I feel the story of the Holocaust should be told in the most appropriate medium possible - if anyone out there is interested, especially Holocaust survivors or World War 2 veterans, feel free to contact me.
|
 
|
