I wanted to see Final Fantasy, not a feature film cgi version of Starship Troopers.
The movie was complete garbage.
The concept sucked.
The voice acting sucked.
I hope someone quotes me on this, because throughout the whole thing I was thinking "Starship troopers." over and over again with a reluctant yawn.

Here, I have no excuses. I actually paid to see this garbage at the cinema. I got ripped off. But at least I can now advice others not to make the mistake I made. Instead of renting or buying this junk, why don't get a pirate copy? or download it from somewhere? I don't know, i mean, I am aware that is ilegal but the crap called "The Spirits Within" justifies any kind of law infrigement. Either aviod it or get it for free (those pigs at Square shouldn't get a cent for their "work").

Sci-Fi and animation has never been a very successful combination, and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was unable to turn that trend around. While this film lost over $100 million in the box office, it is deserving of a second chance. The plot is essentially video gamesque. Deadly phantoms roam the earth after arriving via giant meteor. Simply coming in contact with these spirits is deadly. But Dr. Aki Ross has found 5 of 8 life forms that she needs to neutralize the phantoms. During the course of the movie, she must find the remaining 3.

I don't want to spoil the movie, but there is quite a bit of action throughout, and plenty of death to go around. The death effects are particularly cool, and contact with a phantom causes a humans spirit to be sucked out of its body. The animation in amazing in this film, and stills are beautiful. I don't think any film since has captured the realism as FF; however, some of the movements of characters are a little unnatural. Anyways, this film is way better looking than Kaena: The Prophecy, though the style is very similar. Also, while there is a happy ending, its happy in the sense that not everyone dies as opposed to the War of the Worldsish ending where nobody you care about dies. The song during the closing credits is also worth checking out, and perfectly fits the films mood. Lastly, there are top rate voice actors in this film, from Donald Sutherland, to Ving "don't call me Michael Clark Duncan" Rhames, crazy eyed Steve Buscemi (without the crazy eyes of course because of the animation and all), Ming-Na AKA Mulan, and even Alec Baldwin.

So why did this film do so poorly? Well, first of all the title Final Fantasy is a double edged sword. It is a well known and extremely popular brand. While the film certainly contains themes of the final fantasy saga (balance of man and nature, spirituality, and a character named Sid), there are no swords or magic, no chocobo or moogles, and the film is set on Earth rather than some newly imagined world. Fans of Final Fantasy seemed to struggle with accepting this film into their cannon. A better title would have been simply The Spirits Within. Also, as stated above, Sci-Fi animation seems to be a big turnoff to movie goers. People want real explosions, and mature sci-fi. Unfortunately, many people (read Americans) ignorantly think cartoons = kids and do not expect an animated film could satisfy adult expectations. Lastly, the plot is a little too video game like, and a bit predictable. Some of the characters, especially the antagonist General Hein, are not as developed as they could have been. It really is too bad this film bombed though because I would have loved to see the planned follow-up. But, $100 million is a big loss, and in this case the studio was bankrupted. :(

All in all, this is an enjoyable film. It is ambitious and beautiful despite not really meriting the title of Final Fantasy. Nevertheless I grade this film a respectable B.

Although Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within in every aspect fails to be an entertaining, coherent or even decent piece o material that can be considered of "good cinema":it's weird, pretentious, excesively symbolic and fails to make a point making it not even a movie without a single identity taking ideas from dozens of movies and animations.
Still this amazing failure prove a lot of things too both the industry of games and movies: personally as a long time fan of the final fantasy games this is a complete insult and flaw, but even with that I'm not one of those hard-time fans who would kill for an adaptation of the games. I as everyone else know the power of todays fandom and the result of that was: first, the fact that yes, the fans can make everything possible (in this case not only real adaptation of the games but actually a sequel and "conclusion" of one of the most important parts of the saga) which in many cases (as proven in "Advent Children")not always is a masterpiece, useful to the humanity or simply accesible to the public (I mean how many of us remembers o have played FFVII?)

"Spirits Within" proved many things: the future of animation is here, even with the aging looks impressive and we are above something completely different to the CGI of Pixar and Dreamworks, this are real humans. Yep, the story is boring, weird and too pretentious for a ridiculous mix of Ci-fi with space spiritual aliens, as well show us that (again) that games and movies is a killing mix (even if Square is on the label).

Thankfully the Square animation projects didn't die on this and they gave us an amazing animatrix short as well the full-motion videos in all the games systems. Oh, yeah an also that overproduced and awesomely short movie that we called "Advent Children", so useless that personally I keep prefering an original idea like "Spirits.." over a poor sequel game adaptation. Decide and judge by yourself altough both still will impress you.

Out of all the films I watched I've never been so bored watching any of them as I was through this, one time while watching I fell asleep, the last time I turned the TV off a quarter of the way through, feeling tired, the big thing was that it was still daylight outside, this film is the most powerful narcotic I know (and I have bouts of insomnia). For a film with the word Spirit in it, it is bizarre that what it really lacks is a soul. Sure the character models look great, in a creepy, so hyper-realistic they no longer look real sort of way. The fact is, like the other reviewers here have stated, they can't emote to save their lives and they are weightless, so it's handy that they spent so much time in the weightlessness of space then.

Watching the film just reminded me of Aliens and the fact that I have the Alien films to watch for this sort of Sci-Fi thriller action. Final Fantasy is just so relentlessly bleak and morbid, with barely any humour in it, sucking any will you may have to watch it. Generally it's ironic that when you first see the main characters, suited up in their body armour, that they are just as featureless without the masks. And without the ability to care about the characters, or a plot which may work in a game environment, but trips at the starting line; its a film with only one redeeming feature and that's the ability it has in putting me to sleep.

I had the misfortune of watching this while flipping channels and stopping on the SciFi channel. My curiosity getting the better of me, I paused for a quick glance. Not two seconds passed before my first impressions were "Holy heck. What is this? A computer generated version of rotoscoping?" For something that's supposed to be the next step in computer animation, everything in this film is terrifyingly unrealistic and kinda creepy. Nothing seems to have any weight, and the characters lips just flap up and down without any synchronization to the words. Kinda like the way video game graphics and animation look. If it's not the animation, it's the stupefyingly bad acting and dialogue. Avoid at all costs. It's nothing like the Final Fantasy games at all.

WHY OH WHY!! A spin-off of an incredible video game series always makes me leery, but this was ridiculous.
(Think- Zelda: THE MOVIE) *shudders*

I didn't think it could get much worse than Dinosour (spelt it that way on purpose) but I couldn't even finish watching this one. I could've thrown a gallon of shoe polish at this movie and it would do nothing to chisel off it's dullness.

It would have made a better silent movie.

This flick was complete eye candy (for the most part) the characters often moved so stiffly and mechanically I wondered if the creators even bothered to watch the movie themselves. Overall, this movie is hardly worth a large review, so if it's ever be useful to anyone, it's if you're studying 3d animation.

Review may contain spoilers

It seems it was a natural progression, and it sounded like a good idea at the time. Final Fantasy started as a series of 8-bit sprite games on the Nintendo Entertainment System and 16-bit sprite games on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Then, Squaresoft tested out a 3-D engine for the Nintendo Ultra 64 (thankfully, Nintendo dropped the “Ultra” before they released their console), but instead brought Final Fantasy VII to the Sony PlayStation (I’ve heard some say that FF VII is what sold the console) and with the advent of the CD technology used in the PlayStation, came the use of FMV - Full Motion Video.

Final Fantasy VIII was truly the first game to master 3-D FMV, and Final Fantasy IX improved upon FMV even more. So with the Final Fantasy series already looking like a movie with game elements contained within (how can you not have a movie-quality game when you have Skywalker Sound providing your sound effects?) it was about time Square cut the game out and delivered just the FMV.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was that movie. And it follows the storytelling style of the games pretty well. Most fans of the games cry out that TSW is nothing like Final Fantasy, and shouldn’t be called such. But essentially, it’s more like the games than fans would care to admit. TSW’s storytelling, as I’ve already mentioned, is much like the games: it possesses enough plot twists to keep the viewer happy (even though I could semi-predict one of them, said twist still came as a surprise), and as is often the case with the games, it turns out that the evil force you hear about at the beginning of the story isn’t really the true evil of the movie. Just because chocobos, moogles, and a scientist/inventor named Cid never appear in the movie (okay, that’s splitting hairs, saying Sid isn’t Cid their names are pronounced the same), it doesn’t make it any less valid a Final Fantasy. And since this is Hironobu Sakaguchi’s playground, I’m sure he does have some say on what gets the name Final Fantasy and what doesn’t. (Or at least, he used to...)

TSW’s assets include a musical score that fits the movie very well (although like FF VII, I don’t enjoy most of the soundtrack unless I’m watching the movie), and decent voice acting by some very talented actors, including Gargoyles VA Keith David and Mulan VA Ming-Na. Fans of the game series might be a little surprised that the voice acting is decent, as I have heard horror stories about Final Fantasy X’s voice acting (and although as of this writing I have yet to play the game, I have heard samples of the game’s voice acting and I must agree that it is pretty bad). This perplexes me, as FF X was released a year after TSW (but considering where the movie fell short, which I am about to cover, I guess I’m not surprised).

My main complaint with TSW is that while the characters look real, they don’t act completely real. Sure, they walked and talked like us, but the main criticism I’ve heard from friends is that they don’t emote like us. And I must admit, it’s a true enough concern. As of yet, I have not seen realistic CGI crying in a movie or a game. (If one such movie or game does exist where a CGI character cries realistically, please let me know.) Heck, the crying in FF IX was done better, and that game was released a year before TSW! If this odd downward spiral continues in voice and FMV quality, who knows what Final Fantasy XII, or Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children are going to be like!

To me, TSW doesn’t rate quite as high as any of the games (with the possible exception of Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest), not only because of the lack of visible emotion (though they did seem to show a character’s terror somewhat competantly), but also because of an ending that seemed to come abruptly (another similarity to FF VII that I noted), and left you wondering if things really were alright with the Earth. What makes this worse is that you are taken from the climax, straight into the gentle and lonely-sounding ‘The Dream Within’ while end credits roll. I don’t know if the point was to leave you hanging, but I’ve come to expect a lot better from Sakaguchi and the writers at Square.

Still, this movie doesn’t deserve all the criticism it has received from the Final Fantasy fandom, and deserves to be looked upon as something more than the black sheep of the Final Fantasy series. It’s certainly an alright movie for those who have never played the games, and definitely a different kind of experience for those who have. I would recommend this movie to anyone who does not have a closed-minded attitude about their favourite video game series.

Prior to this moving coming out all anyone could talk about was how incredibly realistic it looked. The posters and the images floating around in magazines made people's jaws drop. That CAN'T be CG! Wow!

And yes, it looks great... provided those characters aren't required to move--or act.

Most of the animation in this film was done with motion capture so the body movements are largely okay... it's when the characters try to emote that they hit the wall. I particularly remember one supposedly deep, emotional scene where the lead character is crying her eyes out but her face is still stuck on 'neutral'... *sob* *sob*... really, I am crying, really... I know if it weren't for the audio, you'd never know I was crying... but really, I am.

The story? Well, pretty weak. The biggest complaint most people had is that the story had nothing to do with the stories in the Final Fantasy video game... although rumour has it a movie based on Final Fantasy VII will be coming out in Japan next year.

Thus, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within has the dubious honour of being the only 3D CG movie that has been made thus far that bombed at the box office.