Movies

The Avocado Movie Club #15: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)

Welcome to the Movie Club! This week’s movie is Hironobu Sakaguchi’s Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within!

Japanese film poster. Weak poster game again with this movie.

In Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within an alien meteor has crashed on earth, resulting in the planet being attacked by unknown lifeforms known as Phantoms and forcing the survivors to shut themselves away into barrier cities protected by large energy shields. A scientist, Dr. Aki Ross (voiced by Ming-Na Wen) believes she can defeat them if she gathers eight spirits, and teams up with her former mentor and a squad of soldiers known as Deep Eyes to do so, while being antagonized by General Douglas Hein (voiced by James Woods), who would rather blast them with an orbital laser and do severe ecological damage in the process.

Final Fantasy is the first film “adaptation” of the popular video game series, also created by Sakaguchi, although much like how the individual games often carry little relation to each other, this movie is a unique story with little to no connection to the games at all beyond some basic overarching themes (and a character named Sid). It took them 4 years to create it with a team of approximately 200 people, and was released theatrically in the US on July 11, 2001.1 Reviews were mixed and it was a box office bomb, only earning around $85 million against a budget of $137 million, which ended up contributing towards the eventual closure of Square Pictures, the film studio created by SquareSoft, developers of the game series.23

Trivia: 

  • There are a total of 141,964 frames in the entire movie, each of which took an average of 90 minutes to render!
  • It was intended for Aki Ross to become a sort of digital actress for future films from Square Pictures, but this didn’t end up happening due to the film’s financial failure. 
  • All of the backgrounds in the film are actually hand drawn matte paintings.

What did you think? Share your thoughts below! 

Up Next: February means Black History Month! Our next movie will be the classic Spike Lee joint Do the Right Thing! We’ll meet to discuss it on February 7 at noon. Check out the trailer and where it’s playing below:

USA

  • Stream: Prime Video, Starz (with Apple TV)
  • Rent or Buy: Amazon, Apple TV, Microsoft Store, Google Play, YouTube, Fandango At Home, Spectrum (Rental only)

Canada

  • Stream: Nothing!
  • Rent or Buy: Apple TV, Google Play, Amazon, YouTube, Cineplex Store, Microsoft Store

UK

  • Stream: Nothing!
  • Rent or Buy: Apple TV, Google Play, Amazon, YouTube, Sky Store, Rakuten TV
  1. https://web.archive.org/web/20140301092244/http://www.awn.com/animationworld/behind-scenes-final-fantasy-spirits-within ↩︎
  2. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl3008595457 ↩︎
  3. https://www.ign.com/articles/2001/10/04/square-pictures-shuts-down ↩︎