Review: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

Geoff Carter

Wednesday, July 11, 2001 | 5:04 a.m.

Final Fantasy

Grade: One-half star

Starring: The voices of Alec Baldwin, Ming Na, Donald Sutherland, Steve Buscemi and James Woods.

Screenplay: Al Reinert and Hironobu Sakaguchi.

Director: Hironobu Sakaguchi.

Rated: PG-13 for sci-fi action violence.

Running time: 113 minutes.

I don't know how it plays as a game, but as a movie, "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" is a soulless, nearly-humorless enterprise that not only features digitally-rendered personnel, but may well have been written and directed by them as well.

Less than 10 minutes into this photo-realistic computer-animated film, I wanted to shut the damn thing down and play "Tetris." I wanted to walk across the hall and watch "Tomb Raider" or "Pearl Harbor" -- awful films, but at least I could relate to the errors made in those films in human terms. Even "Tron" had visible human error (lots of it). Seeing the bad acting and poor emoting in "Final Fantasy" -- and there's plenty of it -- makes me wonder if the filmmakers have ever watched real live people in action -- talking, smiling, weeping, looking chagrined by their mistakes.

Yes, mistakes. I remember a story about producer Nile Rodgers, and his reliance on drum programming: Once he caught a programmer placing a deliberate mistake in Duran Duran's "Wild Boys" and made him take it out. "If I wanted timing errors," he rebuked him, "I'd hire a drummer."

"Final Fantasy" desperately needs a drummer -- needs mistakes, flubs and personality outside of the protocols that came with the software. The story of Dr. Aki Ross (voiced unconvincingly by Ming Na) and her battle to restore life to a post-apocalyptic Earth largely inhabited by alien beasts, "Final Fantasy" has the markings of a great science-fiction film -- that film being "Aliens," of course, the James Cameron film that unwittingly supplied this mess with an operating system. Look for good chunks of "The Matrix" and "Blade Runner," too, acting as piecemeal software patches.

The graphics are, admittedly, stunning, but director Hironobu Sakaguchi (his first feature film; everything he's done before this runs on a video game console) packs the frame with so much rubbish that you're forced to concentrate on the human faces -- not a good idea. You notice how poorly their mouths move in many scenes, how plastic their skin looks, how mechanically they walk. (Not surprisingly, the characters look more convincing when they move fast, and the mouth movements look more realistic on bearded characters -- there's more ways to cheat the eye, given those variables.)

And the voices are ill at ease with their new bodies. Alec Baldwin overwhelms heroic Captain Grey; James Woods is wasted on the comically evil General Hein; I can't hear Steve Buscemi's voice coming out of the young soldier Neil without wondering where those wonderful bug-eyes went. Only Donald Sutherland seems at home in post-environmentalist Dr. Sid, and even he's made to say dialogue that makes you feel badly for him.

Tom Hanks recently inveighed against "Final Fantasy" and the concept of digital actors, wondering aloud what's to keep Hollywood from raising the dead and putting them in films -- Marilyn Monroe with Hugh Grant. Frankly, after seeing "Final Fantasy," I'm a bigger believer in Hanks' theory than I was going in. Here was a story that was obviously dead, and the filmmakers revived it and put it through its paces. Not even Angelina Jolie can kill this lumbering zombie now. The program is running, and may heaven help the user.