Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

  For the longest time, I had a prejudice bias that this movie sucked. People that watched it said it wasn't worth it, it cost $137 million to produce but only made $85 million worldwide in box office sales, and it featured neither Cloud nor Squall. No single black mage or Chocobo.

  Soooo, if the movie was so bad, how come I watched it again after 10 years? I just happened to be working on a series of posts on the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII. Doing further research for material, I 

read the article on the Lifestream and saw it linked to the movie and mentions the Gaia Theory. Interested, I read on and eventually re-watched the movie.

Production:

  As mentioned above, the movie had a huge budget. This is very evident in the technology used in the animation. For a movie made in 2001, the photorealistic graphics of the movie still owns made after it to this day, ten years later. 

  Each frame of the movie is 10 megabytes and has twice the resolution of your HDTV. To give you an idea, standard videos play at 24 frames per second. At 10mb x 24fps, four seconds of the movie is one gigabyte. Yeah, I know.

  Designs for characters, environments, technology, vehicles and creatures are top notch. From armor scratches, dust on the ground, hair movement, and even freckles and skin pores. You gotta hand it to them. Keep in mind that this was 10 years ago. 

Plot (avoiding major spoilers, of course):

  The story centers around Dr. Aki Ross and her struggle to save the planet from the mysterious alien terror called Phantoms. Some thirty years prior to the events of the movie, a huge rock known as the Leonid Meteor hit the planet, and with it, came the Phantoms. 

Dr. Aki Ross

  For the past several months, Aki has been having the same dream over and over. And each time the dream repeats, it goes further than the last time and reveals more images. She records these dreams as she believes that these are messages and that something is trying to tell her something. The recordings get longer, but the message behind it remains unknown.

  Aki Ross and her colleague Dr. Sid attempt to understand the nature of the Phantoms in relation to Gaia, the spirit of the Earth in search of a way to eliminate the threat without the use of military might as armed combat may injure Gaia. As irony would have it, the military had built the Zeus Cannon-- an orbiting satellite that houses a powerful weapon with the sole intent of destroying the Leonid Meteor and the Phantoms with it.

Phantoms Attacking

Zeus Cannon

  As the story progresses, Aki finally finishes the dream. The alien race that was the Phantoms' former selves tells her the events that conspired prior to the meteor crash. Their planet was one torn apart by war. This caused their planet to be ripped apart by its own Gaia. As the planet collapsed, a chunk of it eventually became the Leonid, taking with it the alien Gaia and the ghosts of the dead aliens; violent, bio-etheric manifestations that can pass through solid objects and kill living organisms on contact.

  The military eventually succeeds at firing the cannon at the meteor only to agitate the alien Gaia to appear. Further shots only agitated it and caused to expand and grow more violent. Some spoiler moments later, Aki manages to stop it by awakening Earth's Gaia to protect itself. Just like the Lifestream did in FFVII.

Gaia being all Lifestream-y

The Verdict:

  Watch the movie with an open mind and don't expect Cloud or Squall to appear. The story is very well composed, but very poorly told. Aki remains interesting and engaging throughout the movie, but the other characters suffered. Photorealistic 3d and visual effects are way ahead of its time. Nobuo Uematsu's work was nowhere to be heard and thus the movie lacks awesome music. If you're a Sci-Fi fan and a Final Fantasy fan, watch it. If you're a Final Fantasy VII-only fan, you may not be able to appreciate it as much. Better wait for my Advent Children Complete review which should be out soon.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits within is property of Square Pictures and Columbia Pictures.

All images are screencaps from the movie.