Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within Review by Beth Ann Griese

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Starring	Voices of Ming-Na, Alec Baldwin, James Woods
Director	Hironobu Sakaguchi, Motonori Sakakibara
Year	2001
The Scoop	The plot - a scientist and a military squadron try to save Earth from the hordes of aliens that have overrun it - plays second fiddle to the astounding computer-generated graphics that create this movie. See it for the incredible animation work, but don't expect the story to keep you interested beyong the first three minutes.
What it's worth		Cable (If you're sick, stuck in front of the TV, and don't have much better to do with your time...)

According to the film, in the Earth's future, a spaceship brought to the planet the Phantoms - mysterious aliens that can rip out a person's soul by touch and slide through walls as if they were air. Humans have been beaten back to tiny enclaves, protected by magnetic fields and weapons that can hold back the Phantoms long enough to keep its occupants safe, but just barely.

The heroine is Dr. Aki Ross, who is working on a scientific team to try to put together a collection of spirits that will work as an antidote to Phantoms. Ross meets (or, rather, re-meets: apparently they have been an item before) Grey Edwards, who, with his small team of marines, decide to help Ross collect up this antidote, working against the clock that has been set by General Hein, a man whose determination to blow the Phantoms sky-high may result in destroying the Earth (or the Earth's spirit).

All the headlines about Final Fantasy focus on its most amazing aspect: the animation itself. No doubt about it, this is cutting-edge work. Each hair moves on the heroine's head. Characters' skin has blemishes and features that makes it look amazingly close to real most of the time. People move as if gravity really were affecting them (well, except for a few scenes that are zero-G and supposed to be that way). Just gawking at the scenery kept me busy for at least 20 minutes of the movie.

Unfortunately, after that 20 minutes, there isn't much to keep you in your seat. The characters can all be described in three words and never progress much beyond that. The plot spends most of its time teetering on the edge of incomprehensible. (Are these spirits mixed like a cocktail drink? A gaseous form? Once combined, do they just multiply to spread all over the earth?) The movie stretches so long and so thin that it becomes interminable: I was looking at my watch three-quarters of the way through. It could have seriously benefited from some trimming - or some better exposition.

Some of the press about this film asked if animation is getting so good that human actors are becoming outdated. This movie answers with a resounding no. Even with the amazing advances in animation that this movie shows, they still don't come close to expressing the emotion and generating the empathy that human actors do. Part of that is the fault of the script: I've seen movies with much worse animation that did a much better job of creating believable people. But in the end, Final Fantasy's animation proved the same point as the story's plot: that technology is no match for spirit.

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