Spirit/Soul | Alien\Ghost: a film review of Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within

For my 35th birthday, locked in the comfy prison of COVID, I requested of my partner and remote friends that we watch a film. For most of COVID, we've taken turns selecting films, and we've watched some trash and some amazing titles. It's been fun, and sad, and depressing, and bewildering, but mostly a fun thing to do with friends you can no longer visit indoors or at a bar or within any proximity. We have a degree of trust in each other, and that trust (when violated) results in some ribbing. Such as, after watching the cult bad movie Things, which is an audio-visual nightmare of a film in that it makes no sense and is legitimately nauseating to watch in terms of its editing and framing (I should...write...about Things), we all told the selector that we were disappointed in him, that it was a regretful evening. Yet, I have thought of Things quite a bit since, so maybe there is nothing to regret - the unpleasantness is the point of Things. 

Yet, a birthday film choice is special, as no one can really oppose it, or give you shit about it. It's a dalliance, a little bit of whimsy allowed under the current circumstances. So I picked Final Fantasy - The Spirits Within. 

I hadn't seen it. I read the reviews, for I was all of sixteen when it came out and glued to our cable internet and Pentium II desktop, so I knew. I knew. Indeed, after playing FFVIII so recently, I knew to my core that I would not enjoy this, nor would it have any redeeming qualities. But maybe!

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It did not. For a film from 2001, it still looks pretty good. Like, the animations don't feel jerky or amateurish, and the facial animations are amazing. For all of the six or seven characters in the movie, they all look alright! Sorta like mid-tier animation from now, but 19 years ago! Wow. But also, everything is smeared in greys and browns, something you could never say of any FF game. And the designs for the world & characters are painfully generic. You can tell they used a similar design for Aki's hair as Laguna from VIII. You can tell the guy who likes the weird half-helmets that obscure your vision got his wish, and all of two extras from mission command wear such helmets. It is a visual bore, rather than a mess.

The story is a mess AND a bore. Sakaguchi's environmentalist/Shinto "everything is alive" sort of storytelling works in the games, as you take hours and hours to sink into a world, learning with the characters that everything breaths, everything lives, everything is connected. 

Which, of course they are connected - we're inside a game, all designed and built in several coding languages, compiled to run on selective hardware. The vague sense of it being alive is the trick, though, where we sense the life that made the words that filled the mouths of characters that said those words, which is to say they did not say anything as they are not a person and not a pipe, in form of text within boxes or along the bottom of the screen. 

When Aeris talks about the Lifestream, our party (along with us) could express a general "Hmmm," but when we see the actual glowing white stream pouring across the landscape, yeah, we believe. Hell, did you see Emerald Weapon? One look and yeah, I'll believe in an endless river of souls that powers the world.

So some aliens died, sent a meteor to earth as a last effort, which has some spirits? And there are eight of them? Also earth has been ravaged and people live in walled cities, because intangible alien ghosts of various horrifying variety wander the earth, pulling the blue glowing souls from humans they touch. I would argue they don't need to roar or menace with their transparent claws when a simple brush against a "Phantom" results in horrifying death. I would also argue that Alec Baldwin's male lead might be dumb as shit, when he expresses at the end, shortly before dying by soul-removal, that he didn't believe in an after-life before this. Bitch, did you see the visual expression of the soul being removed from your comrades? We have a spirit...within (go to church).

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Anyways, this is an hour and forty minutes, and could've been longer, but shouldn't have been, and should have not been made. Sakaguchi resigned from Squaresoft shortly after this, and Square Films died too, which had been built in that locale with nothing but free real estate - Hawaii. Yes, the most expensive place to build outside of NYC, probably. They built a studio, staffed it, and made this movie, and that Matrix short, which is essentially the same thing - ship flies through canyon, pursued by weird shit.

And perhaps that is what is odd about The Spirits Within - it is like previous films, but also resembles media that came after. You can draw some connections between the techy cockpits most of the story happens within and similar scenes within The Matrix, though the latter has more grit and grime to it, perhaps because The Matrix didn't need to seem shiny and fresh and expensive, but real in a way that contributes to its overall aesthetic; The Spirits Within feels more like a collection of assets, laid out in display and motion, for us to ogle and if we are the leadership at Squaresoft, to feel good about our investment, secure in our pending merger with Enix, the longtime J-RPG rival. Yet, there are aspects which feel distinctly like The Matrix Reloaded, such as the ship returning to the city and seeing its vistas against the devastated exterior world, or even The Matrix Revolutions, where there is a noble last stand by a soldier armed with a semi-movable gun turret. Both of these films came out in the subsequent few years, and were in the midst of production when The Spirits Within was released - these connections are mere tropes of this era in sci-fi. 

But perhaps a closer comparison can be made with Jeff Van Der Meer's Annihilation books. Over three books of descending quality (sorry Jeff), we learn about a zone created by an alien force, and within this zone, things get funky - time is odd, people change, and it seems like the zone is alive, conscious, and watching. Hmm. By the end of the trilogy, we learned that the zone was created by a fragment of an alien or trans-dimensional civilization, which experienced some calamity and sent out this world/dimension-altering fragment to create a safe harbor for...trans-time whales of inarticulate design. 

And then it ends. There is no epiphany but for a bird flying over digital fjords, which may be real, or not. It is not a wet fart, as that would be amusing; it is a dry wheeze and a clumsy slipping into sleep, a boredom I wouldn't wish on anyone. This was a mistake that should have been questioned ten thousand times before the test shots were rendered, and it speaks to Square's hubris, which they have yet to really learn from. Look at Kingdom Hearts or Final Fantasy XV, total messes that stretched on for years in development, redesigning, and then release...but then again, look to their reception, which was less than glowing but more than total disdain. 

Meanwhile, Aki in digital swimsuit exists, as an image you can look up, and feel nothing but the vague, horny pity for a writer who was granted his wildest wish, and wasted it.