WARNING! MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT! IMMEDIATELY HIT BACK IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT THE MOVIE IS ABOUT BEFORE YOU SEE IT. OTHERWISE ENJOY THIS REVIEW :)

Today I had the fortunate experience of seeing Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, by Square Pictures, something I had been eagerly anticipating for quite some time now. Let me first start out by saying.... *pauses* WOW! *pauses* Holy crap that was beyond awesome! Sure enough Squaresoft has done it again, pretty much blown me away with their acheivement, this time going outside the medium of Video Games into full feature length photorealistic motion video that will leave you contemplating the future of film making and cinematography. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within looks to be the best this summer has to offer in terms of a total cinematic experience worth getting to the theater for.

The CGI rendering in this movie falls well above the bar of the FMV's in Final Fantasy VIII, and the stuff of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. We're looking at technology about 5 to 10 years ahead of us now, probably only reproducable on something as powerful as a hypothetical Playstation 3 or 4. Just for curiosity sake, how many polygons are being rendered simultaneously? A couple billion? I'm sorry but this blows anything created by Pixar out of the water, I've never seen anything come close to this. The attention to detail and the photorealism is a true merit to the amount of quality this film represents and the time is must have taken to bring it about. The true vision in this film is unparalleled and you will be in awe at what it accomplishes visually.

In the movie we find that it takes place toward the latter half of the 21st century after a meteor crashed into Earth from a distant planet that was destroyed by a race of lifeforms. These lifeforms are all that remain of the essense of their world, or Gaia, and exist in spirit form only and consume living material. They are ravaged by utter suffering and devour the souls of the living and living material. These creatures are called by humans, "The Phantoms" and they range in size from a man to flying dragonlike spectres, to massive building sized macromonsters. They can pass through objects and draw the living essence of a human right from the body in less than a second. There are certain spirits that are strewn across the planet that represent the power of Gaia to heal the Earth and purge the invaders. Aki Ross(Ming Na) is the primary beholder of this almighty Gaia energy that will save the world, she has an infection of the Phantoms inside her that is contained by the forces of the Spirits. She has psychic dreams that the Phantom's communicate to her with and show the war and subsequent destruction of their world in. Dr. Cid (Donald Sutherland) is the head of the team involved in finding a unique solution to the onslaught of the Phantoms a kind of Gaia wave that will sweep across the planet and restore Earth and quell the turmoil of the Phantoms. He invented the Phantom repelling forceshield that surrounds the few pockets of humanity left. Aki is romantically involved with Captain Gray Edwards (Alec Baldwin), part of Deep Eyes Squad (military) and as the movie progresses their affection for each other becomes visable. Gray Edwards is the martyr of this film and sacrifices himself to act as a conduit for the energies stored inside of Aki. Gray Edwards commanding officer is General Hein (James Woods), who has a personal vandetta against the Phantoms, who killed his family in San Francisco, and will stop at nothing to destroy them. He wants to deploy the Zeus Cannon from space to destroy the Phantom's primary incursion, a massive crater where the meteor crashed into earth, however Dr Cid and Aki oppose him because by destroying the Phantoms he will in turn destroy Gaia (planet Earth) along with it.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within draws a lot of themeology from Final Fantasy 7, with the power of the planet, or Gaia (we remember it as Holy) as it is called is used to overcome the darkness of the Phantoms (Meteor), and there is a central female character (Aeris) that holds the key to activating Gaia. This should sound familiar to you if you played Final Fantasy VII. However in this film it's not her that becomes the martyr rather her love, the male character. Beyond this the plot is indeed unique, the characters bold and new, and the setting a paradoxically familiar and unfamiliar location of Earth's future. I must say that Aki Ross almost looks like a merging between Laguna Loire and Rinoa from Final Fantasy VIII.

My hat goes off to Hironobu Sakaguici for bringing this to the world and putting forth the kind of effort that goes above and beyond what other's in the CG movie industry have accomplished before. Squaresoft has always been at the forefront of things, bringing innovative ideas and bold examples of what technology can achieve for sometime. When I reflect back to the early nineties and I played games on the SNES like Final Fantasy III (VI), Secret of Mana, and Chrono Trigger, I used to think to myself then, you know, the people who make these games, are going to someday revolutionize not only the RPG genre but going beyond to something more ambitious like movies or novels. Final Fantasy VII was an opening fanfare for what the company would someday become. Sure enough the time came and I saw fruition of that prior reflection, the production of a fully computer generated ultrarealistic movie. Indeed, the convergence of the mediums of video games and motion picture is commencing. This certainly brings the question into the spotlight - how long will it be before actors are replaced entirely? Squaresoft has certainly sent a shiver down the spine of Hollywood, perhaps only a precursor to the future when entire characters will be molded and formed inside the computer and only their voices will be human beings, then again someday that may cease when technology affords us the ability to merge our consciousness via some kind of neurotransceiver with a replicated environment that our brain perceives as real and we "become" the characters.

Hironobu has stated publicly that he will continue to produce more films, some possibly based on the Final Fantasy games, but rather he wants to use the same models, Aki Ross for example in another movie with an entirely different premise than "The Spirits Within." He also stated that a sequel to this film is a possibility as well and with the techniques used to produce his first movie he will be better suited to enhance upon what was already done adding further to the realism. He has a bold vision, and like George Lucas making Star Wars, he knows that the only limitation is that of the imagination itself.

Even if you don't particularly care about the Final Fantasy series of games (You either don't like those "reedin' games" or you can't figure out what HP/MP means) , you should still go see this movie just to bathe in it's forward thinking premise and amazing computer animation. This is probably the best movie of the summer, worth every penny of the 5.00 I paid to view it. I can't say that Planet of the Apes looks too amazing, considering the TV show and the movie kind of bored me when they used to play those on reruns and then later when Sci-Fi channel came online. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is revolutionary and without a doubt beyond compare at this point in time. Video Gamer X gives this movie two calloused thumbs way up!