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Feminism: The Ugly Truth

Mike Buchanan

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Extracts from Erin Pizzey's Foreword: 'Mike Buchanan is a very brave man. I've known other men...

Vamping the Stage: Female Voices of Asian Modernities

Andrew N. Weintraub, Bart Barendregt, Christine Reiko Yano and Yifen Tsau Beus

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The emergence of modernity has typically focused on Western male actors and privileged politics and...

A Guide to National Security: Threats, Responses and Strategies

Julian Richards

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A Guide to National Security offers an analysis of the threats and policy responses facing the UK,...

Ecclesiastical Knights: The Military Orders in Castile, 1150-1330

Sam Zeno Conedera

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"Warrior monks"-the misnomer for the Iberian military orders that emerged on the frontiers of Europe...

From German Cavalry Officer to Reconnaissance Pilot: The World War I History, Memories, and Photographs of Leonhard Rempe, 1914-1921

Paul Rempe

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Twentyoneyearold Leonhard Rempe volunteered to serve Germany in 1914. By the time World War One...

Hadrian's Wall: Archaeological Research by English Heritage 1976-2000

Tony Wilmott

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From 1976 to 2000, English Heritage archaeologists undertook excavation and other research on...

LoganCrews (2861 KP) rated Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) in Movies

Sep 20, 2020

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)

2001 | Adventure, Animation, Sci-Fi

6.2

(22 Ratings)

Movie Rating

I have almost nothing new to add, everything you've heard is true: the animation is almost religiously astounding for the time and even now (in spite of some expected hiccups for the rudimentary motion capture of the time: i.e. speed being an issue - anything that moves above 0.1 MPH has an unsightly motion blur all over it and all the running looks like mall-jogging), CGI wouldn't look this good for years and years afterward but the thing moves at a snail's pace with an oddly apparent avoidance of any sort of fun. Certainly still weird and visually prepossessing enough to get a pass (if this didn't have its unforgettable photorealistic animation it would suck just as hard as any other generic sci-fi fodder, this is home to some truly bracing imagery) - but what the actual hell were they thinking with this writing? All the characters are nonentities in their own story (delivered with similarly boring voice acting by an all-star cast, which most animated films would later replicate directly) and whatever remnants of a story are left behind in the rubble *do* have the potential to be poignant and thought-provoking but are rather just passively mentioned a time or two by way of banal exposition into a mess of things that don't add up to anything more than a stupid story. Can't believe they thought this would work with... anyone (especially fans of the character-driven games given that they turned this into some odd but rather bland alien film for some confounding reason lol) considering all the massive amounts of money they shoveled into it - and minus a few more points for being another tech-heavy future fantasy set in a world that's entirely grey and decrepit. However, the last half hour is some squarely invigorating, enigmatic spectacle that finds an intense beauty in how mind-boggling and glamorous it all is - you'd think the whole thing is always one second away from collapsing into the best of non-western genre surreality. In fact It seems almost unreal in and of itself to be watching something so conventional yet so unrestrained and auteurish. Really needed like eight movies to fully explore these themes but I'm also kind of glad they didn't - half epic and half yawnsville but the epic is more epic than the yawnsville is yawnsville.