Spirits Within; Plot Without

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From mocap to Resident Evil, and from the passing of a family member to a financial loss of $105 million. This week we talk about the commercial failure (and reason why Square-Enix games where Playstation 2 exclusives for a long time) Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

psst. we've actually done a bunch of these "goes to the movies" episodes. Check this page to see all of the released specials.

Here's a sample of the full show notes - make sure to click through and check them out.

Content Warning

Please listen responsibly.

Show Notes

In this "Goes to the Movies" episode, we wanted to tackle a movie which isn't necessarily based on an actual game, per se - but keep a look out for Jay's interpretation, very soon - so we tackled Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

As with our House of the Dead episode - do check that out, if you want to hear the boys talking smack about an Uwe Boll movie - we decided to change up the format of our "goes to the movies" episodes. Instead of working through the plot, we decided that it would be much more fun to focus on a handful of scenes from the movie. This serves the double purpose of:

Simplifying our episodes, and getting to the gags quickerNot having to discuss the plot which this movie doesn't have

Just before we started recording though, Chief uttered the following famous last words:

I'm a pro at this now, I've done that many episodes that I could probably do this myself.
- Chief

With that said, we jumped to jump straight into a description of this movie...

Basic Info on the Movie

Jay dropped some key facts on this movie before we could get to our discussion on it:

This is a movie that was released in 2001
... it is THE reason why a whole bunch of Square-Enix games that came out after that were PlayStation exclusives for a long time
... it is known as the 4th biggest box-office bombs of all time
... it cost (in 2022 dollars) $190 MILLION to make, and almost drove Square out of business... and only ever made $85 million back, which is less than half of it's budget.
- Jay

Interestingly, the story that this movie was based on - the script was originally called Gaia - was written during the final few days of working on Final Fantasy VII, and was written by Hironobu Sakaguchi shortly after his mother passed away. It was then re-written by Al Reinert (co-writer of Apollo 13) & Jeff Vintar (writer of I, Robot), and was combined with three years of RnD in Hawaii to create the final movie.

It's also important to remember that the fallout of this movie lead to the merger between Square and Enix almost being canned. Both companies were in pretty dire straits - even with the rousing success of both Final Fantasy VII and VIII - and Sony had to step in to buy a (reported) 20% stake in Square to keep the merger alive (as Enix wanted to pull out). And this is why a large number of Square-Enix games of the early 2000s were Playstation exclusives.

Just think about that for a second: The Spirits Within was that expensive and that much of a flop that it undid all of the profits from both Final Fantasy VII and VIII.

Initial Thoughts

Each of the boys agreed that the movie is beautiful to look at, especially for it's time.

I don't think I'd willingly go back and watch it again, though.
- Chief

Before we got into the movie proper, Jay asked:

With 0 being the worst and 10 being the best, how would you rate this film as a film? Imagine that it's an IGN score though: it doesn't mean anything
- JayChief: 5Squidge: Numberwang (or a 7)Jay: unrated

Chief had this to say about his score:

What I mean is it's a middling film. The plot is serviceable, if a little uninteresting and uninspired. It makes sense, and the animation is good... but one thing I will say about the sound, though. You know when they're firing the weapons? It always feels under-powered.
- Chief

Squidge had this to say about his score:

I've seen some good CGI movies, and I've seen some $h!t. And so many years later, it holds up... some of the best parts of the movie are Steve Buschemi... the pacing is way too fast, then way too slow.
- Squidge

And the boys all agree that the movie would have made a great limited series or a game. In fact, they all agree that it plays out very much like a video game.

You could probably make [this into] a tactical shooter, survival horror game.
- Jay

Had Netflix been a streaming service back in the tail end of the 90s - rather than just a DVD rental service - they would have bitten Sakaguchi's hand off to make it.

It's just done too quick, isn't it? There's good stuff in there, but it's so rushed over that by the time you get to it, you think "ugh, well I've seen that now."
- Chief

Full Show Notes

Make sure to check out the full show notes for more discussion on the points we raise, some extra meta-analysis, some out-of-context screen grabs from the movie, and some links to related things.

Are you a fan of the Final Fantasy games? Have you seen this movie before? If so, what did you think to it? Would you fling it into a tree? If not, are you likely to watch it now?

psst. we've actually done a bunch of these "goes to the movies" episodes. Check this page to see all of the released specials.

What other movies would you like us to cover? Let us know on Discord, Twitter, Facebook, or try our brand new contact page.

Links

Here are some links to some of the things we discussed in this episode:

Join our Discord server and be part of future episodesUs on TwitterOur Facebook pageSupport us on Ko-FiFinal Fantasy: The Spirits Within

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