Videogame Cinem: Final Fantasy The Spirits Within

Square Enix is one of the most frustrating gaming companies currently existing. One moment they’re releasing masterfully crafted remakes of their classic efforts, the next they’re infesting in NFT’s and making whatever the hell Forspoken was. Modern day Square Enix has more ups and downs than a roller coaster designed by Michael J Fox.

But it wasn’t always like this. In fact, prior to its merger with Enix, Square Soft was a veritable powerhouse of a developer. From it’s erstwhile days on the NES and SNES, to its unstoppable ascent during the PlayStation 1, Square Soft in the mid to late nineties was a force to be reckoned with. And it owed it all to its flagship series, Final Fantasy.

To be more specific, to Final Fantasy VII. Who’s huge success catapulted Square from a hometown hero to a global sensation almost overnight. But what was it about FF7 that made it so successful? Was it the great gameplay, the cast of memorable characters, or was it the engaging story that made it such a blockbuster?

The answer is… none of the above. Oh, that was what made it beloved by those who played it, but it isn’t the thing that got people to put money down on it. No, it was the cutscenes that did that. And before you balk at that idea, just take a look at the games trailer.

Yeah, notice that they focus almost entirely on the cutscenes and show little actual gameplay, it's just like a modern gaming trailer. Now, to be fair, this did make sense. Firstly, because RPG’s weren’t popular in the west at the time, and second, because the cutscenes were technically impressive.

Keep in mind that CGI animation was still very new. Toy Story had only released 2 years previous, and its follow up, A Bugs Life, wouldn’t come out until the following year. It was still new technology, and it was still some years away before it would dominate the realm of animation.

So to see a videogame do this was pretty damn impressive. Sure, they’re a little dated by today’s standards, but even now the artistry and technical wizardry still manages to impress. Especially with the way they seamlessly transitioned from the gameplay to the cutscenes.

This technology would be a trademark for a lot of Square’s games during this era, with each one improving the animation quality. By the time you get Final Fantasy IX, aka the best one, you can see just how far they had come.

But with how great the cutscenes turned out, Square thought to themselves “hey this new CG animation stuff is taking off, why don’t we just make our own CG animated movie”. Thus, Square Soft would establish its own filmic division in the form of Square Pictures.

But Square didn’t want to make any old CG animated movie, they wanted to make the first photorealistic animated movie. Which was a very bold, ambitious, and incredibly expensive endeavour.

See not only did Square Enix have to build a new studio in Hawaii, since this was meant to be an international effort, but they also had to build their own custom hardware to make their dream a reality. Said hardware, dubbed SQFlesh, was made using only the most cutting edge of tech and took 18 months just to build the damn thing just so they could get their first movie off the ground.

Said movie would be based on Final Fantasy, because why wouldn’t it given its recent upsurge in popularity, and would be written and co-directed by series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi. The other director being Motonori Sakabara who had directed the cutscenes of Final Fantasy 7 and 8.

Though Sakaguchi only came up with the core story. The actual screenplay was written by sci-fi writers Al Reinart and Jeff Vinter. The former being most famous for Apollo 13, and the latter for writing the Will Smith movie you probably forgot existed, I Robot.

Unfortunately, Sakaguchi’s story which dealt with a lot of lofty convoluted themes clashed with the two writers more down to earth style which resulted in the story and dialogue meshing about as well as oil and water. I also can’t imagine the language barrier helped either.

The script was constantly being tweaked and rewritten during the films 4-year production. A production time that was, and still is, insanely long for any kind of movie. For reference, Lord of the Rings was filmed in little over a year, not the first movie the entire trilogy. Peter Jackson had filmed an entire trilogy of unfilmable books in less than a quarter of this films production.

Turns out making the first photorealistic animated movie was very time consuming. The characters alone consisted of over a thousand polygon’s and rendering those and the environment took an insanely long time and a lot of manpower. Over 200 animators wound up working on the film, putting in a combined total of 120 years of years. Jesus H Tap Dancing Christ that’s a lot of people.

Now granted, the ambitious nature of the project did attract Columbia Pictures as an international distributor, and Square had plans to use the lead character Aki Ross in other projects as the worlds first virtual actress to save time on future projects. I have no clue how that would have worked as the entire concept doesn’t make a lick of sense when you think about it for even a second, but that was the plan. They even put her in a bikini to show off her, ahem, assets and get people excited for the idea. No really, they did that.

Anyway, while the ambition was certainly commendable, all the stuff we went over, the expensive tech, the 4-year production and the amount of people working on it, ended up ballooning the budget to cartoonish levels. And that’s not even getting into the cast which was filled with recognisable names like Alec Baldwin, Steve Buscemi, Donald Sutherland, James Woods and Ming-Na Wen. Wow second movie in a row with Ming-Na Wen in it, that’s a weird coincidence.

The final budget wound up being $137 million, or just over $200 million in today’s money. That is not a small budget, that is a very big budget, what were they going to do? The only thing they could do, focus all their marketing on the technical stuff. The story was a hot mess, but the look of the film was impressive and a technical marvel. So, most of the films marketing was focused almost exclusively on that.

Sadly, this wasn’t enough. The film only wound up making $85 million at the box office, becoming one of the biggest bombs of all time. The critical reception was also poor. The animation was praised, but the story and dialogue were considered sub-par at best.

Fan reaction was even worse though. Turns out, despite having Final Fantasy in the name it had little to do with the actual games. Thematically it had some vague similarities, but in terms of the style, genre, and recognisable iconic elements it was nothing like the source material.

But I suppose we should actually start looking at the film now. That way we can find out what went wrong and whether there’s anything salvageable in this. So, let’s dig in shall we.

And since they put most of their efforts into the animation, why don’t we start with that. As I’ve already gone over, the technical power at the time was incredibly impressive. This thing had some of the most realistic character models and texture work ever put into an animated movie.

Even today it’s still impressive what they were able to accomplish. There are some truly beautiful shots and moments that really show what the technology was capable of. But I said moments for a reason. Because while it has moments of visual splendour, most of the time it just looks dull.

A lot of this is down to the story, which features a lot of characters sitting around and talking. Not allowing much room to flex what the technology was capable of. But another reason is the decision to make the film photorealistic.

I mentioned this a while ago during my ill-fated Pixar marathon, but one of the issues with 3D animation is that it tends to age more rapidly than traditional animation. Whereas a 2D animated film will look just as good now as it did when it came out, a 3D animated film, particularly an older one, will not.

And a lot of that is due to the fact that 3D animated films are entirely based on the technology used. The tech used to make the first Toy Story is much less advanced than what was used to make Toy Story 4 and it shows. Compare the human characters in the early Pixar films to ones made today and the difference is night and day.

This is why a lot of the best 3D animated movies favour stylisation over realism. Because it helps future proof the films so they will look good years from now. Even films with a more realistic style like the Shrek movies do this. Shrek’s characters look more realistic in an almost off-putting way, which is the point. it’s meant to have an intentionally ugly look which is why it ironically still looks good today.

Square didn’t understand this at all. In its vain effort to make the most photorealistic animated movie at the time, they forgot the sad reality that what is graphically impressive now won’t be as impressive 5-10 years in the future.

Compare Spirits Within to another movie that came out recently with photorealistic animation, Avatar the Way of Water. I know the latter is technically a live action movie, but let’s be honest there’s so much CG in it that it might as well be an animated movie. Regardless, Way of Water’s animation blows Spirits Within out of the fucking water. It’s not even close. Even the original Avatar looks better than it because its technology was light years ahead of it.

This is the problem with banking so much of your film on the impressive tech behind it. Sure, it might be impressive in the moment, but at some point, someone is going to come along and surpass it. That’s just the nature of technology.

So if that’s the case, what does Spirit’s Within have going for it visually? Sadly, not much. I will say a lot of the futuristic holo-technology is pretty cool to look at. This kind of future tech with holographic interfaces would be the standard in a lot of science fiction media going forward. It was ahead of its time in that regard.

Everything else, is just standard sci-fi stuff you’ve seen a million times before. Part of what makes a work of science-fiction stand out is the setting. You look at Star Trek, Aliens, Star Wars, Dune or Cowboy Bebop, and while there might be some overlap, the settings for each are so visually distinct they give each their own character.

Spirits Within? That’s just a collection of sci-fi/postapocalyptic tropes you’ve seen a million times before. Outside of the holo-technology very little of it has any character of its own. The ruined city scape in the opening is just like any other ruined city scape you’ve seen in literally any other post-apocalyptic story ever told.

Even when it does things to stand out like the holo-tech or the Phantoms, the ethereal antagonistic force of the movie, it can either look so weird it’s hard to know what you’re looking at, or it just plain looks stupid.

Case in point, rather than use parachutes when descending from a plane, instead they use this weird green substance to cushion their fall. I have no idea how this works and it just looks like the character are landing in jelly. It’s unique I’ll give it that, but it’s also very silly and seems more impractical than anything else.

But the worst part of the visuals are the character designs. These have got to be some of the blandest designs I’ve ever seen. Which is insulting when you consider the source material. Say what you want about Final Fantasy’s character designs, especially in some of the later games where they got super weird, at least the characters looked unique.

Spirit’s Within character designs are so stock you might as well store them in a warehouse. Aki Ross may be nice on the eyes, hence the bikini shot, but there’s nothing about her that’s visually interesting or memorable. And her love interest Grey is no better. He basically looks like every protagonist from a military shooter released in the past 10 years.

The worst part about them though is the facial animations. The overall animation is still pretty good, but they really dropped the ball with the faces. They barely show any emotion, and everyone ends up looking stiff and robotic.

This is another consequence of the photorealistic art style. One of the main strengths of animation as an artform is it allows for more exaggeration. You can do things in animation you wouldn’t be able to do in live action without it looking weird and I find animation is at its best when it embraces that. I like my animated characters to have big emotions and exaggerated motions because your taking full advantage of the medium.

But because Spirits Within is trying to be realistic it can’t really do that. Instead, it uses more subdued facial animations that don’t work nearly as well. They lack a lot of the subtleties you get in live action performances and half the characters spend the entire movie with the same dull expression on their face. The main villain, General Hein, spends almost the entire movie with the same pissed off evil smirk.

I can see why this movie would have looked impressive back in 2000, hell as I’ve said before it still looks impressive today in certain parts, but the more I think about it the more I realise the photorealistic route was a mistake.

Funnily enough, I feel the same way about this movie’s visuals as I do with a lot of 3D videogames. The ones that tried to be more realistic, those are the ones that have aged poorly. It’s the one with a more stylised aesthetic that have aged like a fine wine.

I can’t blame Spirits Within for this choice though. At the time, making the most advanced, realistic looking animated movie made sense. The games were known for pushing the boundaries of CG cutscenes in videogames, so it only made sense to do the same for movies.

But time has not been kind to that decision and the animation suffers from it as a result. I guess if you view it purely on a technical level it can still be enjoyable to look at and it does have a special place in animation history as a great technical achievement.

But compared to other animation milestones like Toy Story and especially more recent movies like Puss n’ Boots Last Wish and the Spider-Verse movies, I don’t think it holds up nearly as well. It lacks the charm of the former and the latter are just way more visually engaging.

So at the end of the day the animation remains a technical achievement and little else. It’s not visually interesting to look at most of the time, and what little innovations it brought to the table were greatly improved by later works. If you’re looking at this purely for the animation it really isn’t worth it, especially since the rest of the movie is way, way worse.

The plot is complete and utter nonsense. It’s one of those films where the plot is simultaneously too simple and too convoluted. About 80% of the movie is spent with characters talking about the most goofy sci-fi techno babble gobbledy gook I’ve ever heard.

If you’re expecting a lot of action, you’re not going to get that here. This is one of those sci-fi movies that’s more cerebral, where there’s a lot of talking about larger concepts and ideas. Normally I don’t mind these kinds of sci-fi stories. Hell, that’s what a lot of Star Trek is, and I like that.

But Star Trek worked because a lot of its ideas were grounded in some understandable reality. They were talking about things that were relatable, things anyone could grasp. Spirits Within just comes across as pseudo philosophical bullshit.

There’s talk about life and death, but it’s all done in an overly simplistic flowery way that makes it hard to take seriously. One of the films major concepts is Gaia, this energy force that gives life to the planet. if that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s near identical to the Life Stream from Final Fantasy 7 only nowhere near as interesting. And I think I know why.

At first you may think that getting Hironobu Sakaguchi to direct the film version of Final Fantasy was a good idea. After all he created it, he knows it well and the series did take a noticeable drop in quality after he left Square. On the surface it appears like getting him to direct was the best choice. In hindsight he may have actually been the worst choice.

Here’s the thing with the Final Fantasy games, they’re long. Dozens of hours long, and it uses that to its advantage. Final Fantasy games often deal with a lot of different themes and ideas. Some of which can be very esoteric if not outright comprehensible. But because the games are so long, they can take their time in exploring it’s ideas fully and delineate them in a way that’s understandable to a wider audience.

In layman’s terms, they have time to explain a lot of their weirder shit. But when you have to condense all of it down into a movie that’s less than 2 hours long, that’s when you run into problems. Everything is either never explained or explained very poorly. And because a lot of it is very out there and weird, most viewers are just going to be left confused by a lot of it.

And the best example of this are the Phantoms. But I should probably give a brief plot synopsis first since I haven’t done that yet. Basically, the story revolves around Aki Ross, a scientist living in the far off future year of 2065, fighting against weird aliens called Phantoms that kill people by ripping their souls out.

She’s trying to find 8 spirits, who’s special frequencies can be combined to create a wave to cancel the Phantoms out and cause them to vanish. She’s doing this not just for humanity, but also for herself. She’s been infected with a Phantom that would normally kill her, but thanks to a brace made by her mentor Dr Sid she’s able to extend her life for a little while longer to find the spirits and hopefully cure her.

Now, already you probably have a lot of questions. Like how exactly do the 8 spirits work? Where do they come from? Why are there only 8 of them and not more given how many things are on earth. Keep in mind the spirits aren’t special objects, they’re just random life forms like plants and animals. At one point Aki says one of the spirits she collected came from a girl dying in the hospital and she only barely got the sample she needed in time. So what would have happened if she didn’t? would it be lost forever or would it have been reincarnated in something else.

See what I mean. This one detail in the plot makes absolutely no sense. No time is spent trying to explain the finer details because they don’t have time to do so. In the videogames they might have had NPC’s or lore snippets to explain how these things worked in detail, but that option isn’t available here, which results in it ending up as a confusing mess.

That’s not all though. The Phantoms themselves are never fully explained either. Later in the movie it’s revealed that they aren’t alien invaders, but ghosts from a planet that was destroyed that are just lost and confused. Yes, the big reveal of the Phantoms is that they’re ghosts, which is what a phantom is… why did you name them Phantoms if you didn’t know they were ghosts.

And this twist raises even more questions. If the Phantoms are ghosts, then how are they able to be killed at all? We see they can phase through walls but are also susceptible to bullets and explosions. The main villain, General Hein, even plans to kill them with an orbital space cannon, so they can clearly be killed again. So they can die twice? I don’t fucking know.

Then there’s the infection Phantoms can give their victims. We never find out what this actually does or how it kills the victims. We know Phantoms kill people by ripping out their souls, so why would they need to infect people. What purpose does it serve, and how exactly are ethereal ghost beings able to infect living organisms with something akin to a virus in the first place?

Stuff like this really hurts the film as a serious work of sci-fi. If that’s what it’s supposed to be anyway. I don’t think even the movie knows what it wants to be. It’s too abstract and ill-defined to be taken seriously as hard sci-fi, but it’s also too dry and exposition heavy to enjoy as a fun adventure romp either. It clearly wants to make me think, but it’s also too stupid to have anything worth thinking about.

And the fact that there’s no emotional through line makes it hard to get emotionally invested in anything either. There is nothing to these characters. You’ve got the standard comic relief who’s the butt of jokes, the wise scientist, the trigger-happy military villain, the stoic male lead, it’s all very stock and none of them are particularly interesting.

There are attempts to give them some depth. General Hein for example has a backstory where he lost his family to Phantoms which is why he’s so hell bent on killing them with his orbital death cannon. And later on when he fucks up and causes the destruction of New York City, which is the second New York City so it’s like New New York City from Futurama, he does show remorse and even contemplates suicide.

That is something, but it isn’t given much focus. The dead family is only brought up in one scene and never addressed again, so it just ends up feeling surface level, like something thrown in at the last minute to try to have some, any kind of substance. So even their attempts at adding depth just end up falling flat.

And the main character Aki Ross, I couldn’t tell you a thing about her. What her personality is, what she likes and dislikes. I know she’s dying so at least she at least has a goal, but as for who she is as a person I couldn’t tell you.

The only thing they do with her is her romance with Grey. And that doesn’t work because Grey has all the charisma and charm as a wet brick. I know I said he looked like a military shooter protagonist, but did he have to act like one too.

And the acting doesn’t help either. Mind you, a lot of it isn’t the actor’s faults because the cast is very solid. Ming-na Wen, Donald Sutherland, Alec Baldwin, James Woods, Steve Buscemi, Ving Rhames, Keith David, these are all incredibly talented actors. They can and have shown they can put on a good performance.

It’s the script that’s to blame because it gives them nothing to work with. This is some truly trite dialogue. It almost feels like an AI wrote this at times. It all feels stiff and robotic, which leads to stiff and robotic performances. I will say Donald Sutherland and James Woods do add some life to their dialogue, but even then there’s only so much they can do.

And it honestly feels like the dialogue and story aren’t really in sync if that makes sense. Nothing feels cohesive. If it feels like a bunch of disparate parts slammed together with no coherent vision. I guess that’s what happens when you constantly rework a script over a 4-year production.

Final Fantasy the Spirits Within is not a good movie. The story is a confusing mish-mash of bizarre, poorly explained concepts, the characters are dull and lifeless and the script is so inane I refuse to believe actual human beings wrote it. Its sole redeeming quality is the animation and even that is showing its age.

As a film on its own its mediocre at best, but as a Final Fantasy film, it fares even worse. Outside of vague thematic similarities there’s very little recognisable Final Fantasy elements in this Final Fantasy. There’s no magic, no moogles, no chocobo’s, no impractically large swords wielded by anime edge-lords with more spikes in their hair than Sonic the Hedgehog. Even Cid, a recurring character in the games, is named Sid in the movie. They couldn’t even do that right.

You could argue a lot of those are surface level, and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. I have heard recent arguments the film is a Final Fantasy film because of its thematic ties to the games. Which are there. You’ve got a destined hero, a misguided villain, an energy force that gives life to the planet.

So the thematic similarities are there, but I don’t see how anyone can think this is a good adaptation of the games. And it’s all for one very simple reason, this doesn’t feel like Final Fantasy.

There’s no sense of wonder or adventure that you get in the games. The world is dull sci-fi, while the game’s worlds are bright, colourful and imaginative. The cast in the games are very colourful, diverse and interesting, except for 13’s, the films cast is stock and boring. This may have Final Fantasy in the name, but it doesn’t have what makes that name resonate with so many people.

Because of that there’s little to recommend here. I can’t recommend it to film fans because it sucks on almost every level, and I can’t recommend it to fans of the games because it’s nothing like them. Apparently, a lot of the choices made for the film was to try to market the film to a wider audience. It’s why they went with a sci-fi setting rather than fantasy.

They clearly wanted the film to be enjoyable to non Final Fantasy fans, but still included all the weird stuff from the games for fans. They tried to please everyone, and in the process ended up making a product that appeals to no one.

Which it didn’t. As I said at the beginning, this was one of the biggest financial film failure of all time. It was such a disaster that not only did Square Pictures end up closing shop, but it nearly cost Square their merger with Enix due to their stock crashing.

And as for Sakaguchi, well he took the blunt of the blame for it. Which isn’t uncommon in Japanese business. He basically quit the company for this and left the series he created, and it’s been on a rocky trajectory ever since.

Sakaguchi has said in subsequent that he is proud of the movie and wouldn’t change anything about it. And fair play to him for being proud of his work. It may not be a good movie, but it does have a place in cinema history that you can’t take away from.

Thankfully he would find his feet by founding Mistwalker, where he would continue to develop games, including Fantasian which came out not too long ago. He even enjoyed the most recent Final Fantasy game, so I don’t think he has many regrets for how things turned out in the end.

And Square would eventually merge with Enix and would go on to greener pastures, like NFT’s, failing as a western publisher, and ruining Kingdom Hearts. They even attempted the whole film thing again with Advent Children and Kingsglaive, the latter of which was apparently even worse than this film. But that’s a story for another day.