Final Fantasy - The Spirits Within (2001)
Average Rating: 5.3/10
Reviews Counted: 143
Fresh: 63 | Rotten: 80
The movie raises the bar for computer animated movies, but the story is dull and emotionally removed.
Average Rating: 4.6/10
Critic Reviews: 30
Fresh: 9 | Rotten: 21
The movie raises the bar for computer animated movies, but the story is dull and emotionally removed.
liked it
Average Rating: 3/5
User Ratings: 130,595
My Rating
Movie Info
The first feature-length motion picture to use computer-generated imagery to create not only effects, props, and environments but also the human cast members themselves, this lavish science-fiction adventure follows closely on the heels of another video game-based film, Tomb Raider (2001). Ming-Na provides the voice of Dr. Aki Ross, a female scientist in the year 2065, a time when Earth has been overrun by extraterrestrial phantoms borne of a crashed meteor. Humans have been pushed back to
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Cast
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Ming-Na Wen
Aki Ross -
Alec Baldwin
Gray Edwards -
Ving Rhames
Ryan Whittaker -
Steve Buscemi
Neil Fleming -
Peri Gilpin
Jane Proudfoot -
Donald Sutherland
Dr. Sid -
James Woods
General Hein -
Keith David
Council Member #1 -
Jean Simmons
Council Member #2 -
Matt McKenzie
Major Elliot -
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All Critics (143) | Top Critics (30) | Fresh (66) | Rotten (80) | DVD (34)
I never stopped marveling at the thousands of individually delineated pores and hair strands of the heroine, but the thin story covering her acquisition of one wave after another while narrowly escaping death time and again is strictly for player one.
Top CriticThis bigscreen adaptation of the long-popular interactive computer game is visually impressive if not dramatically cool, and is marked by "acting" that is no worse than that found in the majority of sci-fi films.
The human figure, however, remains a challenge to current CGI technology, since the detailing of hair and freckles, for instance, proves rather more credible than the marionette-like impression created by cold eyes and oddly unconvincing body movements.
The exercise is so elaborately pointless you'd think the Pentagon had bankrolled it.
A mesmerizing technical achievement.
After you're done marveling at the characters' semirealistic way of moving and the freckles and minor imperfections that dot their skin ... it's all too easy to get hung up on the things that make them seem clumsy and awkward.
First computer animated movie to "star" actors.
It's possible that the effect might be different if this were not a soggy, derivative SF movie and we had more to engage and divert us.
Despite the utterly amazing animation and exciting action, this is nothing like its source material and is very disappointing in the end.
It's a paradox--it's at once exhilarating yet exhausting, thrilling yet boring, masterful yet banal.
From a strictly visual standpoint, the film is like nothing you've ever seen. In terms of story, however, you've seen it all before.
The story is well written and incredibly smart, but probably a bit too spiritual for western audiences.
Even in the world of the digitally perfect, a black man seems doomed to be a disposable sidekick, and the heroine must represent every feminist ideal at once.
It's all very complicated and makes one lose interest quickly.
A lot of painstaking work went into this . . . Unfortunately, the main story becomes nearly incomprehensible . . . and the last ten minutes or so just feel like drudgery.
The plot itself is convoluted sci-fi fare, taking in elements of botany, biology and philosophy, but it makes more sense than Pearl Harbor and the cast seems a lot more human.
A delight, rising well above the standard animated action formula.
It looks like a video game intro.
Visually stunning computer-animated sci-fi flick that unfortunately betrays its video-game origins with poor characterisation, an appalling script and a badly thought-out plot.
Audience Reviews for Final Fantasy - The Spirits Within
Super Reviewer
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- Gray Edwards: [the group in a holding cell] Come on, Neil! Think! You're our guy. Get us out of here!
- Neil Fleming: Captain, the walls are TITANIUM ALLOY and the bars are PULSONIC LASERS! It's not like I can wave a magic wand and-- [the lazers phase out by themselves]
- Gray Edwards: Neil, I'm impressed.
- Neil Fleming: That makes two of us!
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- Gray Edwards: You've been trying to tell me that death isn't the end. Don't back out on me now that I believe.
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- Dr. Sid: Remember what happened to Galileo? They threw him in jail because he said the earth was not the center of the universe. That could happen to us.
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- Aki Ross: This mission was well worth the lives of you and your men.
- Jane Proudfoot: Men?
- Ryan Whittaker: She thinks you're a man.
- Jane Proudfoot: I think she's an idiot.
- Neil Fleming: I know you're not a man.
- Jane Proudfoot: I think YOU'RE an idiot too.
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Foreign Titles
- Final Fantasy - Die Mächte in dir (DE)
- Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (UK)
