Final Fantasy
The Spirits Within
Final Fantasy. It's got a pedigree as long as your arm when it comes to bizarre storytelling, hasn't it? Admittedly, I came to the franchise late, with part VIII, but I was hooked from the instant I saw the pwetty gwaphics of the demo. Then to find that the game was incredibly fun to play as well as - importantly - having a totally engrossing storyline... well, it was a joyous day indeed in the Moth household that day, I can tell you. Final Fantasy is one of the true gaming greats.
When I heard that Square were making a movie based on the games, I was blissfully happy. For, surely, what could go wrong? Well, okay, so there was a Baldwin involved, but there was a Baldwin in The Usual Suspects, and that didn't suck. Frankly, I couldn't wait.
Let's get the graphics out of the way first of all, because that seems to be all people want to know about. They are gorgeous. Yes, you can nitpick them to hell and back because they didn't move quite right, or didn't look wet enough, or because 7 strands of Aki's hair didn't fall right in this one shot when.. but screw that. They are amazing. Sometimes I caught myself thinking "These are real people", certainly I thought "Oh, they're being projected onto a real set, that can't a be a CG room..", which is a dumb thing to think. Outside the "what's real?" debate, the Phantoms are stunning, from yer average person-sized soul-sucker to the enormous transparent jellified serpents and spiders. The Final Fantasy series of games have a reputation for delivering eye-candy on a big scale, and this was absolutely that. Big scale eye-candy. I gulped it down like Giant Smarties.
A lot of people have said that the film doesn't resemble the game at all. Which is arse. It was in the tradition of the games as I know them; totally new characters, totally different place, apparently nothing familiar at all. Then similarities creep in. Monsters from "elswehere" - in this case another planet. Big monsters and little monsters; random encounters and bosses. I bet if we'd seen the names of the phantoms, some familiar words would have cropped up. The need to collect the Spirits of the Earth mirror the Materia/Guardian Forces/Eidolons of the last few games. A love story central to the plot. A villain with a big coat. Spiritualism bonding with technology. A plot which makes your head slowly revolve.
Okay, I'll try to nail this one down quickly. The Earth has been apparently invaded by a bunch of freaky aliens, called Phantoms (They should have called this "The Phantom Menace", but I hear some two-bit sci-fi series got there first). They suck people's souls right out of their bodies and are generally a pain to have round for dinner. So Mankind is forced to live inside huge barriers, which are made of some kind of "bio-etherial" material that Dr Sid (Donald Sutherland's Voice) discovered some years ago. Since then he and his protege Aki Ross (Ming Na's Voice) have been searching for a way to stop the Phantoms using eight Spirits to create some kind of spiritual wave which will cancel them out, for some reason. Anyway, it doesn't matter that they've got six of these Spirits because He of the Big Coat, General Hein (James Woods's Voice), has a better plan. He's got a huge cannon called Zeus, ready to smite the wibbly-wobbly fiends. He cares not that this might injure "Gaia", the spirit of the Earth, because he's a Misguided Fool With Dark MotivationTM.
While all this is going on, there's a love story developing between Aki and Captain Grey (Alec Baldwin's Voice), head of Deepeyes, an elite squad of wisecracking Phantom-fodder, including an excellent comic-relief turn by Steve Buscemi's Voice as Neil. They have some kind of history which isn't fully explained, but all we really need to know is that they are too stubborn to really acknowledge their feelings for each other until they're about to die, such is the way for Final Fantasy love stories. Given Square's usual deft touch with romantic longing, it shouldn't have come as a surprise to find my eyes pricking slightly when, as is inevitable, sacrifices are made for love. I hadn't realised how much I was enjoying the story until then. This isn't just about eye-popping visuals. In fact, a great deal of the visuals are drab, grimy and dingy, which suggests a conscious step away from the "things must explode all the time" school of computer animation. There are real characters here. The Deepeyes unit bear great similarity to the Space Marines of Aliens, and we become as attached to them as we did to their precursors, and are equally put out when they are picked off in the spooky Phantom attack on New York. Aki and Gray have an alarming chemistry for people who don't exist outside of a computer and General Hein is less a panto villain than a deeply scarred human doing what he thinks is right, no matter what the consequences.
In all honesty, I expect to enjoy this movie more the second time round, when I won't be looking for flaws in the graphics, but rather letting the story unravel into my head. It's not supposed to be photo-realistic, just really, really pretty. Separate Fantasy from reality.