This really is kind of like being dropped straight into disc 3 of a sci-fi RPG at the point where the world's gone to shit and the heroes are making their last ditch efforts to save humanity. Unfortunately it's not a good one of those.
I tried my best to give this movie a genuine shot, instead of just taking the decades of claims from other FF fans that it was bad because there aren't any swordsmen or mages or Chocobos at face value. I mean, lord knows FF fans on forums and YouTube in the 2000s had tons of terrible opinions about the franchise. To its credit, I do think The Spirits Within has more Final Fantasy DNA than fans are willing to admit. Many of the wide shots of fantasy landscapes, giant machinery, and urban decay strongly evoke the art direction of the PS1 games' prerendered backgrounds, which I liked. More significantly, though... the story is kind of just rehashing ideas from FF7? All the talk of how when people die their spirits return to the life force of the planet, which is currently in danger due to the actions of the villain; the parasitic alien threat that arrived on a meteor; the climax of the film seeing the heroes descend from an airship into the impact crater left by said meteor, where they discover the aforementioned life force of the planet; a villain using a giant cannon to try and stop a giant monster; etc. etc.
The problem is that all of those ideas are executed much, much worse here. While there are occasional flashes of visual creativity and some of the celebrity voice actors try to inject some personality into the movie, it really is mostly just a very boring film, where boring characters talk about the plot in boring, sterile sci-fi rooms, and sometimes they have boring fights where they try to shoot lasers at alien ghosts. (Although it takes them until the halfway point of the film to reach the "twist" that the invisible, intangible alien beings literally called "Phantoms" in a movie titled "The Spirits Within" are, in fact, ghosts.) It's 106 minutes of that. There isn't even any Uematsu prog rock to carry it.
But hey, at least they tried something new, I guess? The visuals hold up better than they should. I'll give it that. It's not the worst movie ever, it's just a very dull one.
