Final fantasy spirits within stream7/25/2023 Skipping ahead again, with a spoiler alert (like it's needed): Real bad guy Hein gets to use the massive space station laser gun at the end, but it overheats and explodes in orbit, killing him (and presumably a staff of hundreds, but never mind about them, because this isn't their story). This is back-of-the-beermat stuff that went through something like 50 rewrites and still didn't come out anything like coherent. They want to collect eight different spirit signatures from eight different life forms-why eight is never explained, just go with it-to complete a wave form that should, as if by magic, neutralize the phantom signatures and they'll all just disappear. Aki and Sid really don't want this to happen they believe in something called "wave theory," which posits that all living beings-and that includes the invaders-are connected by related spirit energy. Sid (and that's the first connection with the Final Fantasy series at large, albeit with an "S" rather than a " C"), who believe that in damaging the planet, we have also damaged its spirit, Gaia (and there's the second tie to the games before the movie, with The Spirits Within's subterranean turquoise Gaia energy a ringer for FFVII's Lifestream).Īki in one of the film's dream sequences, in which she finds herself on the phantoms' home worldĬut to the chase: the leading real bad guy of the movie, the James Woods–voiced Hein (a third wider franchise nod, as there's an antagonistic character of the same name in Final Fantasy III), wants to use a massive space station laser gun to obliterate the crashed-in-Africa meteor which, he thinks, will do away with the phantom menace (if only it were so simple, eh Star Wars fans?). And there are a handful of scientific types in the movie, foremost among them Dr. The phantoms might have wiped out so many of Earth's cities-people now live behind special barriers, which magically keep the ghosts out, because science-fiction-but really, we had this coming, with or without their intervention. Our long-waged war against our own planet has scarred it terribly. We're just left to assume that they're the bad guys.Įxcept, obviously, they're not the real bad guys. The film offers no explanation as to why these ghosts, which typically appear as humanoid forms with tentacled limbs and elongated probosces, actively engage humans. And they do this with attuned belligerence, working together to surround human soldiers, who use limited weaponry against their often-unseen enemy, and leaving their bodies slumped, still, empty. But on contact with physical life forms, they steal away the "spirit" of the living being, absorbing it. These phantoms are typically invisible to the human eye, visible only by using a flare-gun-like device or when they consume "bio-etheric" energy. This is the same Earth we know, not some alternative version of it, a "Gaia" planet, as seen in Final Fantasy VI and VII there is no obvious magic, no gigantic Eidolons or Aeons to summon. The story goes that strange, alien "phantoms" arrived on Earth, on a meteor, decades before the beginning of the movie, which is set in 2065. As a sit-down experience, hands left idle, it's a cavalcade of unanswered questions, a raft of too-quick conclusions drawn without any context, a heap of general that-makes-no-sense-whatsoever ridiculousness, with everything topped by an ending that just happens without any real feeling of conclusiveness. If the story that it tells had been a video game, at least the instances of interactive action would have kept the plot moving with some compelling beats. The Spirits Within is a diabolically written movie. Distributor Columbia Pictures hadn't put out an animated feature since 1986's second Care Bears movie, which had received a mauling from reviewers 15 years on, history repeated, with the Washington Post calling The Spirits Within "bewildering and trite," LA Weekly concluding that it was "soulless," and the New York Post criticizing its "predictable, nonsensical plot" and "laughably lame dialogue." Square Pictures was absorbed into Square Enix in the movie's aftermath, and the studio left with nowhere else to go after such a categorical box office bomb.īut was the movie really so bad? I've watched it twice in as many days, to see if those critiques hold up. A largely negative critical reception to The Spirits Within disappointment from core Final Fantasy fans regarding its complete departure from the series's magic and materia, chocobos, and dudes with stupidly proportioned swords and the film's failure to see a box office return on its costs of £137 million equalled a stinker.
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