Review of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) by Jon T — 12 Feb 2013

As a tradition, movies based on videogames have often turned out to be complete disasters. FINAL FANTASY: THE SPIRITS WITHIN should have reversed the trend, as it had a lot of things going for it. For one, the games themselves are often richly textured, complex stories involving well defined characters and haunting music.

This film offered truly stunning, state-of-the-art computer animation, and it was directed by the game's creator, Hironobu Sakaguchi. It even offered a respectable voice cast (including Ming-Na Wen and James Woods).

And yet, it still failed, financially and critically, and rather ironically, it ended Sakaguchi's tenure at SquareSoft. As spectacular as it looks, FINAL FANTASY: THE SPIRITS WITHIN is just not a great film.

Despite the presence of the original creators, the movie is nothing at all like the game series its based on. There are no chocobos, moogles, or, frankly, even compelling characters worth caring about, herein lies the first problem.

It is dark, cybertech, and mostly sci-fi. But the second and most major failing is that the plot very convoluted and difficult to follow, with none of the interesting, complex turns or amusing character development we get from the games.

Musically, too, this film falls very short: Elliot Goldenthal's dissonant, obnoxiously loud score fails to do any justice to the source material and the pop song over the credits is mostly dull. All of this makes for a very disappointing adaptation and a wasted opportunity on both Sakaguchi's part and for the game series.

The voice actors do a solid job, and, if only for the visuals alone, this may have some merit, but even those qualities cannot save this joyless, bleak and depressing film.