Moving Pictures: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

I’ll be honest, one of my first introductions to Final Fantasy as a child was by watching Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. So, I’ve made it my goal to watch all of the Final Fantasy movies and anime series, and not long after watching Advent Children as a 10-year-old, I watched Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within on TV. As a child, I had no clue what was going on, but I was firmly under the belief that this wasn’t Final Fantasy.

I decided to watch The Spirits Within again recently, going so far as to buy the Blu-Ray from CeX (a UK retailer that specialises in secondhand goods), and so I rewatched it on my PlayStation 5. Personally, I still don’t think it was helped by having Final Fantasy in the title, and I agree with any critics who have noticed how it hindered it at the time. It’s only related to the series in name, as there are mentions of Gaia, spirits returning to the planet, and there’s Sid — played by Donald Sutherland — but that’s all there is. There aren’t any staples from the series such as Materia, or any iconic Monsters, or Chocobos, or anything like that. Hell, The Spirits Within is set in our world, notably, they live in the Barrier City of New York, with Old New York having been abandoned after the Phantoms attacked.

The Phantoms are the spirits that humanity is fighting against. They can rip out the spirit from your body, and Dr Aki Ross, portrayed by Ming-Na Wen, is infected by a Phantom (because that is a thing that can happen), and Sid was able to isolate it in a way that she wouldn’t be killed by it. So, because of that, everyone is scanned upon entrance to the Barrier cities, and Aki is usually exempt from this due to Sid’s influence. We can see why it’s important when Aki’s love interest, Gray — portrayed by Alec Baldwin — is infected, and Aki saves his life within the first few scenes of the film.

As you can tell, it does have quite the all-star cast, and it even has Steve Buscemi! And by all accounts, the CGI is phenomenal. Considering Spirits Within was made in 2001, with development starting four years earlier, following the global success of Final Fantasy VII, it should have been a success. But why wasn’t it? Well, the answer is that no one who saw it could see the resemblance to Final Fantasy. Hironobu Sakaguchi hoped that Spirits Within would lead to the expansion of an entire Final Fantasy film franchise, expecting it to be a massive success, but the story itself was pretty… complicated at times. Naturally, from the lack of any sequels and the subsequent closure of Square's movie studio, it was not to be. I can’t deny that the CGI was so advanced that it absolutely blew everyone out of the water, but with the amount of time and money that sank into it, it couldn’t really succeed.

To put it into perspective, it cost $137 million to make. Taking inflation into account, from 2001, that would be $243,092,954.80 today. So the fact that it only made back $87 million in the Box Office, it absolutely bombed. Being the first photorealistic CGI film, it definitely showed how animation could be, but in 2001, it was incomprehensible at the time. While Final Fantasy was absolutely a success, it was nowhere near big enough to justify that kind of budget for a film. Sakaguchi was incredibly optimistic, and while I think Spirits Within is a good film, it suffered from having the franchise’s label on it.

It also didn’t help that it only made sense if you were used to the convoluted storytelling of Final Fantasy; oh, it makes sense, but it would have absolutely felt more fitting as a game. Casual filmgoers would inevitably be nonplussed by the experience. It was hard to feel attached to the characters, as Aki and Gray had their relationship, but it wasn’t memorable. The two cared for each other, but we, the audience, hadn’t seen their relationship before the movie. We knew that they were involved in the past, but it’s not like we saw their relationship before Aki was infected by the Phantoms. Likewise, we know Gray had a good relationship with his team — Neil, Ryan, and Jade — but when the three of them are killed, it’s hard to feel anything because we don’t really see them interact outside of missions and Aki. Personally, I enjoyed Neil and Jade’s relationship as it was presented, but it wasn’t done in a way that made me feel anything when all of them were killed.

So, with that in mind, I’d like to say that as a videogame adaptation, Spirits Within isn’t good. But if you look at it from an outside lens, it’s not the worst film in the world. Sure, it had clunky writing, but I think if it had a different writer (Sakaguchi had never written a feature film before this) and was treated as a separate entity from his series, then it could have been so much more.

After all, I couldn’t say anything bad about the performances, and the Phantoms were absolutely interesting. I just think that if they had separated it from the series from the beginning, then Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within may have done better at the Box Office.