What Went Wrong
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
By Shalimar Sahota
November 17, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
“I hope that we will be producing Final Fantasy 23 with Columbia when I have much more grey hair,” joked producer Jun Aida, and president of Square Pictures. “Hopefully, there will be many more projects out there.” Unfortunately for Aida, there weren’t.
Video games company Square initially set up Square Pictures, a studio in Honolulu, Hawaii, back in 1997. The intention was to create a Final Fantasy movie, and other projects should it prove successful. Originally budgeted at $70 million, it spiralled out to $137 million. “We did end up spending more than what we planned,” said producer Aida, “but it’s not by any means a massive number compared to what other major studios have spent on similar features,” The Honolulu studio itself was believed to have used up $40 - $45 million of the budget.
A teaser trailer debuted about a year before the film opened, and during the run up to release the buzz was hot, with the unique selling point being the highly detailed, computer generated look. While Toy Story set the standard back in 1995 as the first entirely computer generated feature film, this was the first go with humans as lead characters. The photo realistic detail was so amazing that if you didn't know this was computer generated you could almost mistake some (mostly close up) scenes for the real thing. There was even a scare as a small band of actors become worried that “computer actors” could replace them. The creators boasted about the CGI effects and the 60,000 strands of hair on their main character Aki Ross, who for a fictional character even managed the bizarre feat of making it into Maxim’s top 100 in 2001.
Distributed by Sony/Columbia, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within opened on Wednesday, July 11, 2001, and reached the top of the daily chart with an opening day total of just over $5 million. With this result, and Fandango reporting that the majority of advance ticket sales from their Web site were for Final Fantasy, reaching the top spot that weekend was clearly in the bag.
By the end of the weekend Legally Blonde was #1 with a gross of $20.3 million. The Spirits Within had amassed $19 million since opening, but a weekend take of $11.4 million meant that it placed #4. Four years in the making and it barely lasted two weeks in the US top ten. Ouch!
Films based on video games were already having a tough time (they sometimes still do today). However, The Spirits Within was an entirely different story not based on any of the Final Fantasy games. The film was also written and directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi, who had also written and directed the games. From Super Mario Bros to Tomb Raider, no video game films were ever really watched over by the games' creators, let alone directed by them.
To bring Sakaguchi’s story to the big screen, writers Al Reinert and Jeff Vinter came on board to develop the screenplay. With the majority of the Final Fantasy games known for their epic storylines, one of the biggest problems with the film was that the same writer/director was unable to replicate this for The Spirits Within.
Set in 2065, most of the Earth has become a wasteland after an alien race known as Phantoms have destroyed just about every living thing. The few people who remain live in barrier shielded cities to prevent infection or death from the Phantoms. Two strategies on how to get rid of them are already underway. Military leader General Hein plans to destroy them with a Zeus Cannon, something that Dr Sid and Dr Aki Ross believe could "injure" the spirit of the Earth. So they have a more peaceful alternative; to assemble a wave pattern by locating eight spirits situated around the planet. They already have six. By combining these spirits, they’ll produce an energy wave that will kill the aliens without harming the Earth.
Incorporating James Lovelock’s Gaia theory (that the Earth is a living organism), the mysticism and overly spiritual story with Aki’s visionary dreams was seen more as hokey nonsense. While arguably a more mature story for a computer generated film at that time, it was likely lost on the majority of bewildered Western audiences. The final theatrical trailer Sony/Columbia put out tried to sell a different film, mostly highlighting the action, when there is actually little of it. This was essentially a watered down mix of Starship Troopers and Aliens.
While a lot of time was spent on how the characters looked and acted human, maybe there wasn’t enough when it came to what they say. The writing just didn’t match the technical excellence on display, with the script lacking any quotable dialogue. There are stories out there about people having cried over the death of a main character in the game Final Fantasy VII. The Spirits Within went so far as to kill most of the main characters off, and I just didn’t feel any emotional attachment with them. Aki talking about a seven-year-old girl ready to accept death is the closest it gets to any real emotion; this only comes about after making small talk with love interest Captain Gray Edwards. Even once the Earth is saved, there’s no real big celebration, or any kind of epilogue; it just ends on a depressingly downbeat conclusion.
For those who had never heard of Final Fantasy, was the film really going to appeal outside the audience of core gamers? Sure, it looked amazing, but the photo realistic look probably turned some people away. Part of the issue was that they looked too good to be human - practically flawless. Some critics even commented on how much Captain Gray Edwards looked like Ben Affleck.
In October of 2001, Square announced an annual loss. They were to cease funding Square Pictures due to the poor box office takings of the film, after grossing $85.1 million around the world; $32.1 million of which came from the US box office. The Final Flight of the Osiris, for The Animatrix, was the last project to be taken on by Square Pictures and was attached to the theatrical release of the film Dreamcatcher. The Honolulu studio closed in March 2002 and Square Pictures eventually became a consolidated subsidiary of the newly merged Square Enix.
For a film which many pegged at the time as the future of cinema, no one attempted to do anything remotely similar until Robert Zemeckis’s The Polar Express and Beowulf came along (which fully embraced motion capture, rather than creating characters from scratch). The Spirits Within is now just a footnote in history as a very expensive flop. Having viewed the film on its opening day I really wanted to like it, only to find it generally okay. Watching it today, the visuals still look gorgeous, but ultimately this was a film driven by technology rather than story.