Tragedy of “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within”
Subtitle: “Film that tried and failed”. Written for some film site. Ultimately unused.
“Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” is a CGI-animated philosophical science fiction film released by Square Pictures a film branch of the developer of the series Square Enix and co-directed by the series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi. It is considered to be one of the first attempts at making photorealistic animated film. One of its gimmicks was meticulously designed digital actors who could potentially appear in other pictures. Sadly, this never happened as film received rather frosty reception primarily focused on uncanny valley effects for human characters and overall weirdly conventional narrative. This resulted in a films crushing commercial dissapointment. Studio gambled on its cutting edge technology as the main selling point and that didn’t payed off. Although you can see legacy of “The Spirits Within” in modern video games and blockbusters in a slightly bowdlerized form — Andy Serkis made a career out of motion capture performance, “Mass Effect” series was inspired by “The Spirits Within” design aesthetic, etc. Now it is regarded as a daring experiment that came out too soon. Which is not right.
The story of “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” is a tragedy. It deserved better treatment. But you can’t really say it was released in a wrong time. At the end of the 90s “Final Fantasy” franchise was riding high and around the time of the release of the film it would reach even higher levels of popularity with “Final Fantasy X”. But it never really had a chance. There are many reasons why. Square Enix definitely underestimated drawing power of the franchise. They weren’t experienced enough in film business. It was marketed the wrong the way for the wrong audience. “The Spirits Within” forced upon itself conventional film narrative instead of finding its own groove.
It was trying to do too much in one sweeping move — to do commercially appealing but daring high science fiction film, prove concept of “digital actors” and make statement about possibilities of modern technologies. But it was obviously too expensive gamble for the newbies to pull off without consequences.
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Basic plot of “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” isn’t that complex. It is a film about far-reaching consequences of miscommunication, lack of desire to understand the other and unknown in general and pitiful inability to avoid conflict and find peaceful solution instead.
Here is how it goes. Earth is invaded by alien race known as the Phantoms — energy-based creatures who feed on spirits of the living beings (Gaia). Unable to stand the offense — Mankind is forced to retreat to so-called “barrier cities” protected from the invaders by complex energy grid. Phantoms intend to destroy Mankind. And resistance seems to be futile. Military led by General Hein intend to apply The Final Solution — orbital cannon to blast the enemy and everything else once and for all even though they’re not sure if that will work out. Use of this weapon may result in complete destruction of the planet but it doesn’t matter because “desperate times call for desperate measures”. That’s the official story. But the protagonist Dr. Aki Ross and her mentor Dr. Sid don’t buy it. They try to understand motives and origins of the Phantoms. With a little help of spec ops unit led by Dr. Ross former love interest Gray Edwards they retrieve the MacGuffin — spirit signatures that are able to negate with Phantoms in some way. Their search for these pieces reveal the truth. It turns out that the Phantoms are ghosts of dead alien race that was brought to Earth on a fragment of their planet. Because of that they’re bound to Earth’s own spirit. Combined spirit signatures are able to separate them from it and thus bring to peace which happens at cost of Mr. Edwards life.
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This film has much more in common with Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Solaris” and Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” than any action-packed science-fiction flavoured blockbusters of the 1990s. “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” is mournful condemnation of human nature. Humans tend to blow up problems instead of taking a step back and trying to undestand its nature. And as such it works rather well. The points are well-articulated albeit littered with New Age mumbo-jumbo. And the characters are very different from ordinary Holywood sci-fi. Dr. Aki Ross, the protagonist, is literally a shell of her former self — deeply traumatized woman who’s trying to make difference all while succumbing to a malady. She’s tough but she had passed far beyond her breaking point. General Hein is also quite fascinating character. He’s byproduct of a system that was built on fear. While it presents itself as designed by reason — it is deeply irrational. It is “we’re no good but there are things far worse than we are — so you’re better stick with us” kind of system. This system maintains the illusion of status quo no matter how twisted it is. It dismisses any opposing thought just because it may compromise the adequacy and legitimacy of the system — even when the contrary actually has the point. This system also allows those who in power to exploit it for a personal means — because “why not, these guys deserve some privilege”. Gray Edwards is opposite of it. He’s also a byproduct of that system. He’s relatively “by the book” but he is opened to another opinion and tens to follow common sense. He’s flexible to make choices based on facts not an ideological agenda.
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The problem of “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” lays in its aesthetics. While it is not like then-modern braindead blockbuster sci-fi theme-wise — it looks like one. While it is obvious that Square Enix were trying to do familiar and plausible futuretech designs — it looks too much in line with still-mainstream “gritty future” aesthetics. There are some unique elements here and there but they’re lost in overall drab. It looks like “StarCraft” at times (fine by me) and it is rather underwhelming considering its ambitions. Other significant problem is narrative. While the story itself is fine-tuned — its delivery is compromised. It is stuck somewhere in-between video-game stages narrative and straightforward sci-fi action extravaganza — all while moving like a character drama. The story is shoved into this unnatural monstrous structure and that neutralizes it. This structure also kills dead the pacing. Instead of gradual exploration of its themes — the film moves erratically, there is no sense of progression of the story — it repeats the same beats a couple of times, skims on establishing proper motives for the characters, meanders at character moments. It is far more concerned about pulling your attention to flashy setpieces than actually telling the story. This makes the film very hard to follow.
On the other hand — “Final Fantasy” brand made “The Spirits Within” difficult to market. “Final Fantasy” is a very interesting example of franchise that isn’t really a franchise. Every entry is a self-contained story. But before “The Spirits Within” all entries were video games. It wrongfully marked the film as “video-game movie” which was a stigma due general poor quality of such films and thus alienated large chunk of potential audience.
Curiously enough — the film’s story tells what happened with the film. There is establishment that is quite small-minded. There is new cutting edge technology that is woefully underused because of lack of marketability. Group of outsiders try to prove its viability. They failed because the establishment was scared of the new and didn’t really wanted to make an effort to change in order to apply these ideas for the betterment of the industry overall. But nevertheless the technology “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” represented was subsequently canibalized by the very same establishment that dismessed it as a dead end as if it was natural.
