Earth is a desolate wasteland in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Humanity has been decimated by an invasion of Phantoms, insubstantial aliens that extract and devour the spirits of living things. The few remaining humans have retreated to a handful of cities that are protected by massive bio-energy shields. The beautiful Dr. Aki Ross (voiced by Ming-Na) and her mentor Dr. Sid (Donald Sutherland) have discovered that the energy signatures of eight key Earth spirits can cancel out and destroy the Phantoms. With the help of Captain Edwards (Alec Baldwin) and his band of marines, they must scour the globe for the last two remaining spirits before General Hein (James Woods) manipulates the refugee government into attacking the aliens with an orbital laser that may also destroy the Earth.

In a class all its own.

I had seen this movie several times on the sci-fi channel at home. I always enjoyed watching it and found the characters so interesting and so alive. I wanted to own it and I actually had a hard time finding it out in the real world. Amazon seems to be about the only place that has it. Matter of fact some store employees would look at me weird and have no idea what I was talking about. It will be a classic one day!

terrible

this movie was terrible....I went into the theater skepical because I heard that the screenwriters were untested...well, this disastorpiece is what you get as a result. The movie did so poorly that it bankrupted Square Pictures.

The dialouge was filled with one liners, wasted several talented actors like Donald Sutherland. The drama seemed artificial, and the story was just bad. What I did like about this movie is that it showed that adult-oriented computer animated productions are possible instead of the childrens movies by Pixar (Monsters Inc....which was actually FAR BETTER than this)

This movie is just bad....avoid it...I want to see them make a movie out of Final Fantasy 6, which was the best of the series in my opinion

A little too realistic. Do we really need CGI to give us bad drama?

"A special effect without a story behind it is a pretty boring thing." --George Lucas

Case in point, Final Fantasy - The Spirits Within.

It begins as so many Hollywood sci-fi movies do: with the success of a video game. Then a flimsy movie plot is formed in the way so many Hollywood sci-fi plots are: from a gross misinterpretation of a sceintific concept, in this case, the Gaia theory. From there, we the audience should expect nothing more or less than a mindless mess of brain-candy. To our surprise, this time, what do we get? A lot of bad drama, performed by computer animated people. Wha? Where did we go wrong?
Seeing real people do bad acting is hard enough, but it's worse when a team of CGI animators try to get you to take their art seriously by creating CGI soap-opera.
This film was marketed as the cutting edge of CGI, promising to dazzle everyone with the level of realism achieved. The trailers wowed us with animations that looked, wow! Like real people!
But this begs the question: So what? Who needs animated people that do the same things real people do? The characters in this movie aren't flying around like Superman, aren't dodging bullets like Neo in "The Matrix," and aren't amputees like Captain Dan in "Forrest Gump." They are just behaving like regular old bad actors in an insufferably bad B-movie. CGI has apparently gotten a little too real. We get more than enough bad drama from real actors already.
Of all the reasons I can think of to use CGI actors instead of real ones (budget considerations, convenience of not having to worry about human problems like acne, illness, death of actors), none of them have anything to do with why I, as an audience member, should want to sacrifice my time and money to sit through what the filmmakers are selling.
Sure, the CGI effects are impressive. But are impressive special effects enough to hold me for two hours?
No. Ten or twenty minutes, maybe. A half-hour if the effects are reeeally dazzling. And that's an important point. When I go to a fireworks display or a laser show, I expect a mind-blowing array of light and sound. Maybe Final Fantasy would have been more entertaining if the creators had tried a little harder to give a good light show as opposed to a serious drama. By trying to have it both ways, they wound up with a mediocre effects show and a dull story. Why? To try to give computer animation an air of legitimacy? Who knows? And ultimately, who cares? Bad drama is bad drama, and it's even worse when it's CGI bad drama.
CGI is useful for aiding a story. If the story sucks, all the CGI in the universe is not going to change that. A special effect without a story really is a very, very boring thing.