#Reddit final fantasy spirits within skin#

You have to wait for it - director Sakaguchi must have known we'd all want to know, 'How will these weird-looking, linguistically challenged lips look mashed up against each other?' Even so, 'Final Fantasy' is hardly all life-affirming squidginess: You see lots of alien phantoms getting blown to smithereens by high-tech firepower, and once in a while it's even marginally exciting.īut the most engaging moment of 'Final Fantasy' comes when the two main characters kiss.

'Final Fantasy' isn't quite as sterile as you'd expect it to be: Its writers, Hironobu Sakaguchi (who is also its director) and Al Reinert, are hyperaware of the irony that these human facsimiles have devoted every pixel of their beings to preserving life as we know it, and they ride it like a bucking bronco to the movie's finish. Their movements are generally smooth, but there's also something creepily artificial about them: They're a little like an übermodern cross between traditional Japanimation and the old Thunderbirds puppets - kind of close to real, but ultimately just high-tech marionettes. They look at each other and their gazes don't quite meet - there's something a little blank, even slightly cross-eyed, about them. No one is young anymore' - their mouths just can't wrap themselves around the words. When they speak - the characters get some primo 'Pearl Harbor'-style dialogue along the lines of 'There is a war going on. Sid boasts a prodigious number of liver spots - get that guy some Porcelana!), it's all too easy to get hung up on the things that make them seem clumsy and awkward.

#Reddit final fantasy spirits within skin#

And for the first few minutes, it does.īut after you're done marveling at the characters' semirealistic way of moving and the freckles and minor imperfections that dot their skin (Dr. 'Final Fantasy,' an offshoot of a popular computer game, is really all about inducing visual awe. Or at least, it makes as much sense as it has to. Well, it kind of makes sense as you're watching it. Sid (Donald Sutherland), who is also Aki's mentor.

They also find themselves at odds with a cranky general (James Woods), who has a vested interest in seeing that the phantom critters get blasted with a highly dangerous weapon called the Zeus Cannon, whose use is opposed by gentle tree-hugger Dr. Gray and the team of soldiers under his command (Ving Rhames, Steve Buscemi and Peri Gilpin, of 'Frasier,' provide their voices) are assigned to protect Aki on her mission. But in her quest for these essential spirits, Aki reconnects with an old beau, hunky Ben Affleck look-alike Captain Gray (Alec Baldwin) the two haven't been in touch in a while, and a rift has opened between them - but you can bet it's going to start closing up pretty quick. A slim, trim, cyberbrunet and woman of science named Aki Ross (Ming-Na, who also provided the voice of the title character in 'Mulan'), takes an active interest in finding out what makes them tick, in the hopes that they can be stopped and the Earth can be saved: To that end, she sets out to find the Eight Spirits, a group of super-duper thingamabobs that, collectively, will have the power to disarm the phantom menaces.Īctually, these spirit thingies are pretty humdrum: The sixth, for example, looks something like a regular old houseplant. These phantoms kill humans, supposedly in a ruthless battle for world domination. They're wraithlike critters who come in many forms: Some of them look a little like undulating Chinese dragons or sea monsters others resemble see-through metal praying mantises others are simply little ghosty-slimy buggers that you barely catch out of the corner of your eye. It's 2065 and the last remaining inhabitants of Earth are fighting a brutal war with the aforementioned phantom creatures, who crashed to the planet years before on a renegade meteor. Interwoven throughout, there's a grand theme about the inner life of the Earth and how it regenerates and nourishes itself with the spirits of all living creatures who have died. At least, that seems to be true of the characters in 'Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within,' an overly dignified computer-animated futuristic adventure starring a cast of allegedly lifelike actors who face peril at the tentacles of a bunch of translucent, jellyfish-like nasties. And they have a higher tolerance for increasingly circuitous and hard-to-follow plot developments.īut you get the feeling they'd be tremendous bores at a dinner party. They look really great in even the most form-fitting jumpsuits. Their jawlines are stronger, their hair is silkier.

Computer-generated characters aren't like you and me.