Sneak Preview -- Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

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By Star Dingo

(IDG) -- You've seen the images on the posters and in the trailer. Glimpses of photo-realistic heads, eyes, and hands, computer generated human beings barely distinguishable from the real thing except that they're simply far too attractive to be real. But 90 minutes of a giant computer-generated eye -- as astoundingly photo-realistic as it looks -- does not a good movie make. Good movies come from story and character and vision -- it's what you do with that giant human eye that really matters.

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Blurring the Line Between Fantasy and Reality

Recently, we were given a sneak peek at the upcoming Final Fantasy film, due out in theaters this July. The 17 minutes of footage shown was made up of bits and pieces of scenes from the movie, so the story at this point is still pretty unclear, but here's what we can say so far based on what we saw:

First off, the film has no connection whatsoever to any Final Fantasy game, other than in its themes, style, and the overall way it feels, all of which is due to the fact that Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of the Final Fantasy series, is in the director's chair. In fact, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within takes place on Earth (unprecedented in the FF series) in the not too distant future (2065 A.D.), after some sort of cataclysm wipes out a good chunk of civilization; now, a different, darker regime holds sway over the planet.

The main character is a woman named Aki, a renegade scientist looking for and salvaging signs of life on the almost barren Earth. Beings known as Phantoms roam the planet -- invisible, fantastic creatures that can be seen only when they're coated with a special energy/light dusting; these Phantoms consume the souls of living things, and are probably responsible for the current plight of the human race. Aki is prone to hallucinations of distant, alien worlds, and the government thinks she has a connection to the Phantoms. That's where the Marines come in -- they meet up with Aki in the ruins of an Old Earth city and help her escape from the Phantoms in a pretty spectacular fight sequence.

Thankfully, any concerns I had when I first saw the Final Fantasy trailer have been mostly squashed by this preview. Painfully bad dialogue from the trailer (It's a life form!) makes more sense when spoken in context, and images that seemed silly, like souls being ripped out of people by aliens, now make disturbing sense. Now all that remains is to fit all the story puzzle pieces together to complete the picture.

And Speaking of Pictures

Final Fantasy looks absolutely beautiful; its creatures, gadgets, and landscapes all show the earmarks of creativity allowed to run rampant. The Phantoms especially look amazing -- a wide assortment of insectoids, lizards, and other sparkling bizarrities. The character models are crazy good, and their motion -- especially the trickier, more complex action-oriented stuff -- is amazingly realistic. Believe all of those shots you've seen of the eyes, faces, and skin textures -- these are by far the most photo-realistic humans ever committed to a screen. Admittedly, the hands and lip-synch motions are a little stiff, and occasionally a character doesn't round a corner quite right -- so no, the film won't be perfect -- but these are just nitpicky details. Keep in mind, too, that this footage was not complete.

So here's a question: Why would you go through so much time and effort and trouble to make digital humans that are so lifelike you can't distinguish them from the real thing? Why not just use the real thing? There's plenty of 'em lying around, and a lot of them would love an acting job.

Well, here's why: There's a reason I still prefer that humans interact with puppets instead of computer-generated creatures. There's a reason Ripley's battle with the Alien Queen in Aliens -- a movie made in 1986 -- is so much cooler than anything computer generated that came along later. Mixing media is a tricky, tricky thing to tackle, and human beings simply could not fit into this Final Fantasy world. Remember Star Wars: Episode I? Remember the scenes featuring Jar-Jar talking to Qui-Gon? Those scenes were pretty convincing, yes -- but mostly because the characters weren't doin' a whole lot of moving around. But you could still make the distinction between CG and non-CG. One of the best action-intense blendings of CG and humanity was when Brendan Fraser fought off a horde skeletons in The Mummy -- but that brief sequence alone must have cost a fortune and must have been a technical nightmare -- and even then, it wasn't 100 percent integrated.

There's a scene (presumably a dream) in Final Fantasy where Aki finds herself standing in the middle of a giant battlefield. An enormous H.R. Giger-inspired spaceship is lodged in the ground. Two legions of dreamlike robot warriors stand at either side of her, and then rush her from either side. She begins to fall through them in a mad, unreal rush... and it looks absolutely stunning, and totally surreal. A human mixed into this otherworld would've been out of place, imperfectly blended; the end result would have been unbelievable.

Hardcore science fiction fans should be ecstatic and wide-eyed at the possibilities this new technological advance brings. We've reached a point where movies allow things to be shown that were never showable before. Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, directed by Seven/Fight Club maestro David Fincher, is the next one of these all-CG sci-fi extravaganzas coming down the pipeline -- go pick it up, read it, and imagine seeing it any other way.

So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish

The bottom line is this: Final Fantasy is looking gorgeous -- chilling, haunting images; technical virtuosity; a feast of concept, motion, design, and imagination -- all that good visual stuff. What remains now as a question mark is the story and the script. Throughout the course of the preview, I never stopped thinking that this was computer animation I was watching; and every time a new character spoke, I couldn't help think, Hey! That's James Woods! or Oh boy, it's Alec Baldwin! That's because without a story to follow and characters to care about, there was really nothing other than jaw-droppingly pretty pictures to draw me in. Will they get it right? Or will Final Fantasy just end up an extended video game cut-scene?

Director Sakaguchi is obsessed with such grand and potentially dangerous (as in cheesy, if you're not careful ) concepts as life and death and existence and heart, but his recent FF games have managed to capture those elements without succumbing to too much tackiness -- so you can't help but think he'll succeed again. Screenwriter Al Reinert (Apollo 13) is on the case, too, as is producer Chris Lee (As Good As It Gets, Jerry Maguire, Philadelphia) -- not too shabby a group of folks to help realize Sakaguchi's vision.

After what we've seen so far, all we can really say is that Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within offers a whole lot of promise -- not just for itself, but for what's to come. And, if nothing else, at least one day we'll be able to look back and say that Final Fantasy gave movie-goers something new·something different·something we had never seen before. And these days, that kind of thing is pretty hard to come by.

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Final Fantasy

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