LogFAQs > #969775885

"Comedy-thriller" is a pretty apt description. It builds up just like a thriller, but it's all for laughs. Not really a kind of movie you see very much.

And now, on a completely different note...

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)
Directed by: Hironobu Sakaguchi
Written by: Hironobu Sakaguchi, Al Reinert, Jeff Vintar
Starring: Ming-Na Wen, Alec Baldwin, James Woods, Donald Sutherland, Steve Buscemi, Ving Rhames
Previous status: Never seen

"I thought we weren't supposed to say the S-word."

No, not shit. "Spirits." Because JRPG. This really feels like a JRPG in movie form, highly condensed to fit the two-hour runtime. Which means the story isn't as rich and deep as it would've been as a game. Really, the writing here was nothing special, but the movie compensates for it by being a technical marvel - ESPECIALLY for 2001 (like wtf, this was when the PS2 was new, for fuck's sake!) - and having the good world-building you expect from a Final Fantasy game. That's really the gist of it. You don't need to read on from here if you don't care.

The world-building is basically the Phantoms have inhabited the Earth (odd that a JRPG-based story is actually set in OUR world) and rendered it uninhabitable for humans, because they eat human's spirits upon contact. The Phantoms are aliens who are lost souls, mistaken for attackers - but they'd inadvertently been jettisoned from the destruction of their own planet, landing on Earth with a huge impact, killing them all. Protagonist Dr. Aki Ross (Wen) is determined to send them to the Farplane by gathering eight spirits alongside her mentor, this Final Fantasy's Cid (Sutherland). It sounds like standard JRPG stuff, which it is, but it's GOOD JRPG stuff.

The plot has a stereotypical megalomaniac villain bent on destroying the world, an inhumane traitor, a standard trigger-happy military baddie named General Hein (Woods). It's incredibly one-dimensional - stupid, stubborn, and unrelenting, stepping on anyone who gets in its way. Its comeuppance isn't as satisfying as it could've been, largely because it got its way and almost actually destroyed the planet (though thinking it was being a hero), then simply blew up with its beloved cannon. No boss fight with the bastard, even though he destroyed the city by allowing the Phantoms in for no reason. He wanted to prove a point, but he ended up proving a completely different one instead. Whoops! I do hope that Aki set the record straight and made it clear that he was the one who almost caused the planet to blow up while the Council was on it. Why Keith David was okay with letting him fire that cannon is beyond me.

You also can't not mention how many JRPG cliches are in here. A romance between the two leads, Aki and Grey (Baldwin). They sure argue like a couple! "Courage is the magic that turns dreams into reality" stuff. Sacrifice (honestly, it would've hit me harder if Ryan, Jane, and Neil had a little more story to them). Evil wins, then suddenly doesn't. The plot necessitating a necessity that was in fact only necessary because it was necessary (Grey sacrificing himself to the spirits to send all the aliens). You all have played JRPGs before. You know what I mean. These are used because they actually work... well, some of them. The "...and then a miracle occurs..." part I could've done without. I did mistakenly conclude that Aki was gonna die in the Tucson sequence. Was surprised that it wasn't her giving herself up.

So the story's nothing special. The characters really aren't either. But, back to the good, the character design is absurdly detailed, and it's incredible how this actually came together - it's just that it was a wee bit too expensive for what it was, and this caused it to lose significant money at the box office, which thus made it so this is a standalone. Dr. Aki Ross was supposed to appear in more movies - at least the character model was, and trust me, she looks real. The other characters are less remarkable, save for Hein, but the animation and environments make up for it. It's true cinematic marvel that so happens to have words and some semblance of a story, and that's really the best way to sum this up. I can't give this anything but a 3/5 for that reason - there's nothing story-wise to make me itch to come back, but if I wanna watch some cinema porn, this one is definitely an option.

@Robazoid @Mobilezoid not sure which account I should be tagging here, but I thought I would. If you wanna nominate something else, feel free!