'Final Fantasy' is better as a game

The film falls short, leaving out much of what's cool in the video game series, especially the magic.

By ANGELO PERRINO

© St. Petersburg Times,
published July 23, 2001

Lots of people will be going to see Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within this summer, but why?

It could be they are drawn by the amazing computer-generated effects, or it could be nothing better came out that weekend, or it might be that they are fans of the video game series.

To the people who want to see it because it looks awesome, I say go. To the people who are bored on a Sunday afternoon, I say go. To the fans of the video game I say go, too, but except for the graphics, be prepared to be disappointed. Like most video-games-turned-movies, there's something missing, in this case the magic of the game, and well, there are no surprises. This movie just as easily could have been titled Alien Menace, Space Invasion or Phantom Attack. Calling it Final Fantasy was just a way to draw more viewers from the video game audience.

Granted, I only saw the movie once and probably missed a few things, because, as in the video game, the creators surely fit in little things you won't notice until you have seen it a few times. There were a few connections. Chocobos, the giant mutated chickens that people ride like horses in the game, made some hard-to-notice cameos. The planets' life force is called Gaia (pronounced guy-ah), which is the same in the game Final Fantasy 7, where people's souls also go into a glowing blue stream exactly like in the movie. In version 9 of the game, the bad guys try to take souls, somewhat like in the movie.

One thing I didn't notice is the inclusion of characters named Biggs and Wedge, who have been in all of the Final Fantasy games as a silent salute to the writers' fondness for Star Wars. I admit, I am not as hard-core a fan of the Final Fantasy game series as some people are, so there might be some connections that I missed. But for a 106-minute movie based on the popular game, shouldn't there be more?

The video games contain cinematic sequences that get your attention because of the killer sound track and the weaponry, and the movie gets one of them right in stunning fashion: the heavy artillery. The movement of this weaponry is like giant killer transformers, only the weapons change into bigger and more powerful versions. For example, the movie's cannon, dubbed Zeus, is a giant satellite that has tons of moving parts and goes through an awesome transformation sequence. This was one of the most exciting parts of the movie, but once again I was disappointed. For such a giant laser, you'd think it would do some damage.

The biggest letdown for me was the absence of magic. Final Fantasy the game has always been a mix of the most advanced technology and mysterious energies that allow the players to cast spells. There is no magic in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. There are no materia, no mana, no summon spells. The only nod to magic in the movie is the life force, or Gaias, of the two planets. A lot of good our Gaia does. It sits there and gets damaged while the aliens' Gaia summons invisible ghosts to steal souls and almost wipes out the human race. How lame.

If there had been magic, there really could have been an excuse for making the movie in computer-generated format. But if you are just going to push a bunch of voices on the screen to hash out a pretty mundane movie, why bother?

Angelo Perrino, 17, will be a senior at Clearwater High School and is a former member of the Times X-Team.

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