Final Fantasies and Hazy Memories
The rewards of measuring the distance to here.
The first movie I ever reviewed was 2001’s Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. I was a senior in high school and wrote about the movie for the school’s paper (unsurprisingly, a high school paper wasn’t all that bothered about me reviewing a movie that had come out over the summer). I adored the video game Final Fantasy VII and followed every development of its follow-ups Final Fantasy VIII and IX. The news of an upcoming movie based on games I loved was cause for excitement, especially since the film promised to push the boundaries of digital animation with its lifelike CGI actors.
However, the film was, to put it mildly, a disappointment. It had hardly anything to do with Final Fantasy (the games have different characters and stories, but share certain elements like creatures, magic, etc.), and the effects were clearly not at a point where any actor should have worried about a digital creation taking their job. Even in 2001, I remember being bummed about the film, although my main complaint was calling it “Final Fantasy” and then doing nothing to actually reflect the game. It was the first (but not the last!) time I had ever been victim of a movie marketing bait-and-switch.
This past week, I went to theaters to re-watch 2005’s Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, a direct sequel to the video game, which was re-released to build excitement for next week’s release of the game Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the second of three installments of a “Remake” project for Final Fantasy VII. I also decided to rewatch The Spirits Within, and while neither film was significantly better, I came away with the satisfaction that I had improved with time.
It's not that I couldn’t recognize the flaws in these films the first time. My memory of Advent Children was that it was a bizarrely structured movie where the first half was all narrative and the second half was all one big action scene. That’s not entirely correct, but it’s also not completely off base either. Just as with The Spirits Within, my assessment at the time wasn’t wrong1, but it also lacked the nuance to really explain where the storytelling went awry.
Since Sony sent me a 4K copy of The Spirits Within back in 2021 for the film’s 20th anniversary, I decided to finally pop it on and see if I had been too harsh. Also, now knowing the trajectory of digital effects, perhaps I could at least appreciate what Square Pictures was trying to do with the movie. Unfortunately, it remains just as much a drag today as it was when it was released. If anything, the digital effects dominate the film not because they look amazing, but because they dictate so many of the story choices.
The film is set on a post-apocalyptic Earth (already off to a bad start since Final Fantasy stories take place in a mythical world, hence the “Fantasy” part of the title), where an alien force known as Phantoms have wreaked havoc on the population.2 While the military believes their new super-weapon is the key to winning the war, a couple scientists aided by a few soldiers believe that if they can find just a couple more organic lifeforms, they’ll find have the key to defeating the phantoms. On its broadest scope, it’s borrowing from Final Fantasy VII’s plot that the planet is alive (in the game they call it the “lifestream,” and here it’s “Gaia”) and that only by healing the planet can they root out the infection.
Unfortunately, The Spirits Within this gets rendered down into its blandest form of space-marines-versus-aliens. My hunch is that the studio, afraid of its own brand (a shocking development since director Hironobu Sakaguchi created the Final Fantasy franchise), decided to ditch all the fantasy stuff for something they deemed more acceptable to western audiences, despite the success of the games in North America and Europe. It’s one thing to rethink the look of your series to force it to grow (as Final Fantasy VII had more of a steampunk/industrial look as opposed to the medieval fantasy of earlier games); it’s another thing to abandon it entirely in the hopes that a generic sci-fi setting will be more palatable to a wider audience.
This move away from anything specific feels like it was done because the film’s budget and effort into the digital effects required something broadly appealing (that ultimately appealed to no one because it lacks a personality). Those digital effects also render the film pretty ugly, not simply with the Uncanny Valley faces but all the dimly lit, sparsely populated rooms the characters inhabit because there was no way to render all the required details. As an adult, I have a better understanding of what goes into VFX as well as the developments in CGI, so it’s easier to see the strings here than when I was seventeen. And look—I don’t want to fault someone for bad VFX when they’re working hard to push the envelope and coming up against technological limitations. Someone has to make the path by walking it.
What I mind is that everything in the story was sacrificed at the altar of these effects. It’s not that they had a killer story worth telling and the only way to do it was with these effects. It’s that they had a desire to use photo-realistic CGI and imposed it on a story regardless of whether it benefitted the story or the technology. While I’m not much of an Avatar fan, when I see that film, I understand that James Cameron needed particular tech to tell that story. The Spirits Within was a tech demo, and not a particularly good one.
Four years later, we got another Final Fantasy movie that moved slightly away from photorealism (the characters have a slightly exaggerated look, which helps both their facial expressions and pulls them away from the Uncanny Valley), and yet Advent Children has its own host of problems. There’s an interesting core idea of “What happens after you save the world?” where characters wrestle with guilt and angst over what will be left to future generations. But again, the storytelling simply isn’t there, so while Advent Children is a more visually dynamic movie than Spirits Within, it also suffers from the same pitfalls.
Part of the problem is that the core conflict, aside from being kind of muddled, just feels lazy. It never reaches any fresh conflict as much as arguing that what you thought you had accomplished narratively in the game was still unfinished. It’s like saying you still have knitting to do because someone purposefully unraveled your sweater. But the larger issue is that the hero, Cloud, has a weak arc. It’s a movie where Cloud comes to realize that he can’t push people away just because he’s afraid of losing them or that he thinks he’ll be a burden to them (something that already doesn’t make a lot of sense given where the character ends up at the end of the game). However, his resolution to this problem is to basically to do the big battles all by himself. Again, it feels like a story running into technical limitations, where it’s better to animate a one-on-one fight than to have Cloud and all his teammates from the game come together. There’s one sequence where we get that, but then the film keeps going through a chase sequence and then the climactic fight where Cloud does it all on his own while the other characters hold back and watch for no good reason.
This is all stuff that’s easier to see now that I’ve been reviewing movies professionally for almost two decades. Nowadays, I have observations that go deeper than “Well, it wasn’t like the game,” or “It wasn’t as good as the game.” I still don’t particularly care for either of these movies, but I can’t deny that I was left with a small sense of satisfaction for my own development. I could talk about these movies within larger contexts, contexts I lacked as a young writer whose dominant frame of reference was a PlayStation video game from 1997. And look—these movies have the words “Final Fantasy” in the title, so it’s not like that’s an unfair lens. But I like that I can come back to these movies and see them as a more mature and seasoned viewer who has an appreciation of the effort behind these films while also recognizing the ways they fall short of the title that inspired them. I think that’s worth a little victory fanfare.
It should be noted that there were movies I saw when I was in high school and simply did not get because I was too young and inexperienced to understand their context and themes. A couple examples where I liked a movie once I was older are The French Connection and Raging Bull.
The best thing about the movie is that the aliens kill people by ripping out and eating their souls. Say what you will about the film, but that’s a unique monster ability.