Movie Reviews from Hell
Final Fantasy
| Director: | Hironobu Sakaguchi |
|---|---|
| Year: | 2001 |
| Rating: |
 |
Since this is an animated feature, let’s start with the technical details of the animation and the animation quality overall – excellent. Indefinitely the most realistic portrayal of humans ever made in CG on the big screen, although not perfect (will it ever be?). Motion capture was used to animate the characters and their facial expressions, so a lot of the realism is still largely credited to human talent.
However, on the flipside, the fact that the film was attempting to achieve human perfection, I believe the film greatly suffered due to that in terms of story telling, compelling characters that you can associate with, and emotional impact on the viewer. A lot of people went to see this because of the “cool” factor, that it’s CG, that it’s great animation, and that it’s part of the Final Fantasy legend – however, I think many were also disappointed with the telling of the story. The eye candy of everything you see is barely enough to hold you through the squirmy feeling you get when you are embarrassed to be watching some of the more transparent scenes.
A good example of that was the little “victory” they staged in the first part of the film when the crew escaped with Aki from the phantoms after rescuing the 6th spirit. When the captain climbed out of the hole the musical cue was extremely overdone, like they’ve just won the war. The problem was we don’t even know any of the characters in that scene yet, they’re just people doing their jobs, and we have an hour and a half left to go yet. And this actually is a good foreshadowing of what’s to come – that impersonality with the characters remains throughout the film. For the most part, the vast majority of the supporting characters deaths do not affect you emotionally, nor does really the question of whether the earth will be saved or not. Square Studios forgot to put the real effort into building believable characters and making the audience actually care if they completed their mission or not, because they were too busy stirring their ego’s.
This film has just about every single cliché “hard thing to do thing in CG” featured in it, and quite prominently at the cost of the story (if you’ve ever spent any mentionable amount of time at raph.com, you’ll see what I mean). For instance, the African American, when he’s impaled and later dies heroically battling the Phantom and steering it from his comrades ship, it’s pretty impersonal and you don’t feel that compelling attachment to his character from his heroic act to stay behind. Normally, if this film had the character development quality of Disney (that’s if people in Disney animations died), a character like this could be tugging tears out of the audience left and right, and drive them into hoping that his sacrifice will save the planet – a sign of hope.
Another part of the film, which in terms of plot was a keystone, was the scene where Aki and the Captain are stranded by their friends in the scanning station – this is one of the only parts of the film they did not use motion capture – they keyframed all of the animation here, and Aki’s theatrical performance greatly suffered due to that. In this scene, the dialogue was put to a shameful waste with the horrible facial expressions of Aki when she was crying – I thought she was having an epileptic seizure for brief moments, overall it just felt really out of place. But her dialogue here was extremely powerful – it could have been used to tune the audience not only into Aki’s compassion and create an emotional link to her, but also make the audience see the importance of Aki’s mission. She was talking some serious stuff in this scene (about the 7 year old girl she met in her travels), but her acting botched it up. Of all the scenes to skimp on, Square picked the worst one.
The other major element of the film which contained extremely bad dialogue was the scientist – he was one of the most realistically modeled characters in the film, and his opening shot actually did him a lot of justice – he was extremely realistic and looked promising. But the believability of his character went downhill from there due to his diminishing dialogue and screenplay. There was no real dramatical pauses in dialogue in the ending scenes where Aki descended with the Captain into the meteor. “The last spirit, has been destroyed”. Shortly after, “Yes, yes, I’m tracking the 9th spirit on the screen now” (as his eyes dart back and forth) – tell me something I didn’t know. They could of held back and had a few things happen complicate the situation, and take the audience on that little roller-coaster ride leading to the climax. “Yes, I understand now, I understand” – I really shook my head with some of the doctors lines, there was no theatrics or timing to any of them really – especially at the “final” battle where Aki is about to save the earth – this is what you are supposed to save all the suspense and theatrics for!
I could only begin to tell you how much I laughed when the Gaia “spirit” floated through his body when he was approaching the crater and stopped to say “aww, it’s warm” – of all the things to say about saving the planet, he comes up with that. I don’t know if it was the dialogue, or the voice talent, but it was really out of place for me when I watched it.