Directors: Hironobu Sakaguchi and Motonori Sakakibara
Starring: Ming-Na, Alec Baldwin, Ving Rhames, Steve Buscemi, Donald Sutherland, James Woods (voices)

Like it or not, ‘Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within’ is destined to be a cinematic landmark. Its opening shot, a delicately rendered closeup of a human eye, reflecting with a million levels of translucency, draws you in to a visual experience quite unlike anything you’ve ever seen — the first ‘photorealistic’ computer-generated film.

The incredibly popular series of ‘Final Fantasy’ computer games have continuously raised the bar in computer game animation, bringing them ever nearer to representing something like reality. The next logical step after the visually stunning ‘Final Fantasy IX’ for director Hironuba Sakaguchi and the programmers at Square was to ditch the interactive element altogether and concentrate on refining their graphics for the next frontier — the big screen. And this what ‘Final Fantasy’ becomes in the end — an absolutely beautiful computer game with a nonsensical plot, sub-‘Pearl Harbour’ dialogue and cliché, and an overwhelming desire on the viewer’s part to grab a controller and make these amazing looking people do something more interesting.

The eye we open on belongs to Doctor Aki Ross (Ming Na — ‘E.R.’), our buxom heroine and feisty scientist. Marauding alien spirits, invisible without special equipment, have overtaken Aki’s future Earth. The last remnants of humanity are holed up behind a barrier shield in New York, where a military headed up by the battle-hungry General Hein (James Woods) is locked in a deep philosophical argument with earth-loving scientist Doctor Sid (Donald Sutherland), whose belief in the holistic theory of earth’s spirit — Gaia — may hold the key to salvation, if only the army don’t nuke everything first. Only crack military units with hunky leaders (Alec Baldwin) and wisecracking sidekicks (Steve Buscemi) venture beyond the barrier, collecting espirits’ which Doctor Sid can use to assemble a weapon that may save them all. And the answer is all in Aki’s strange dreams of a distant planet. Follow?

The great thing about computer-generated actors (in more excitable times, we might have called them evactors’) is that you can make them act out the most horrid of plots and they won’t complain. The actors voicing them are only reading lines into a microphone and don’t quite grasp the emotivation’, so they are unlikely to complain too much about lines such as ‘There’s a war on Doctor, nobody’s young anymore’. Our modern-day marionettes are happy to sacrifice themselves and tell their friends to go on without them when they are injured (but only if they are black), or proclaim that ethe city may be lost, but we are not’.

To risk a bad pun, the one thing ‘Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within’ really lacks is any spirit of its own. Critics complain that computer animation is soulless, but this is a falsehood easily disproved by looking no further than ‘Shrek’ — a film infused with more spirit than a thousand Disney snoozefests. Computer animation is just a tool, no different to pen and ink or clay and stop-motion — it’s how you use it that makes the difference. From the tiniest details, such as delicate focus shifts and the way Aki’s hair blows in a breeze, to earth shattering explosions and fragments of ships hurtling through space, the hyper-reality of ‘Final Fantasy’ looks like nothing that has ever graced our screens. But after five minutes of being wowed by watching water ripple, the stilted, neo-eThunderbirds’ movement of the characters becomes obvious and the film needs something more to sustain it.

Sakaguchi and the film’s creative team are drawn almost entirely from the computer game arena, where you can still get away with half-baked theories of Gaia (represented in ‘Captain Planet’ by Whoopi Goldberg and here by a bubbling pit of blue slime) and ecollect eight components to assemble a superweapon’ plots. What ‘Final Fantasy’ needed, somewhere in its four plus years of production and 40 million dollars of computer hardware, was something the computer couldn’t generate — a script with a soul.