Final Fantasy(2001)

Hironubu Sakaguchi’s Final Fantasy befuddled, if not annoyed, most moviegoers in the summer of 2001. Columbia Pictures lavishly hyped the film as the first to feature truly realistic human characters animated with computers, and touted the film’s cerebral sci-fi plot. Columbia’s executives also forgot that American audiences rarely react well to brainy science fiction films, and that serious science-fiction fans would balk at the frequent inanity of the screenplay. While few will ever confuse Final Fantasy as a classic destined to entertain generations, the film definitely has its moments, and Final Fantasy’s tragedy is that its moments never merge into a memorable whole.

Final Fantasy takes place in a post-apocalyptic world in which the few remaining humans are at war with shadowy alien ghosts referred to as "phantoms," leading one to believe that Final Fantasy’s script was written back when all we knew about George Lucas’ latest Star Wars film was that its name would be The Phantom Menace. In sharp contrast to Lucas’ imaginings, Final Fantasy’s aliens don’t merely serve as cool-looking targets for heroes to shoot at. There’s a logic behind the aliens’ presence that’s far better thought out than in most mainstream science-fiction films, or in animated sci-fi such as Titan A.E. and Invasion America. The film’s characters are a vague motley crew of the sort we’ve seen in science-fiction for a long time, from the stalwart elderly scientist (voiced by Donald Sutherland) to the straight-shooting military hero (Jeff Bridges), to the attractive female protagonist Dr. Aki Ross (Ming Na). While none of them are particularly gripping fictional creations, they serve the same purpose that most characters in science fiction do – they help elucidate the ideas behind the story line. At its best, science fiction allows its author to present a personal philosophy, and Sakaguchi uses Final Fantasy to demonstrate the importance of thinking about problems instead of blindly attacking them.

So where does the film go wrong?

All of the blame falls squarely on the film’s story and screenplay, written by Hironubu Sakaguchi, Al Reinert, and Jeff Vintar. Sakaguchi’s direction is good enough, but the screenplay (which can’t even be explained away as the concoction of a large Hollywood committee) is inexcusable. At its best, Final Fantasy’s story and dialogue are dreamlike; at its worst, they are nearly incomprehensible. There’s a inverse relationship between the quality of the script and the audience’s attention to details – the worse the writing, the more likely the audience is to notice technical gaffes – and the audience is given far too many opportunities to scrutinize the realistic-looking human characters. It’s as if a cameraman decided to zoom in on the hands of a stage magician so we could watch him hide playing cards up his sleeve. And, once we stare too closely at the animators’ craft, we begin to notice how erratic the animation actually is. At times, the characters are breathtakingly realistic (most likely due to a technique known as motion-capture) and at other times, the characters are rubbery and cartoony. Our illusions are spoiled, and our belief in Final Fantasy’s world is shattered.

I desperately wanted Final Fantasy to succeed. While disappointing, it still contains some glorious nuggets in which, briefly, the film transcends its limitations. There are enough of those moments to make the film worthwhile for most animation fans, and the film is certainly more satisfying than the "shoot anything that moves" mentality that dominates current science fiction films. More general moviegoers will likely be even more disappointed than animation buffs. In the end, Final Fantasy belongs to a depressingly large category of animated film – it is a movie of moments, rather than a unified whole.

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