Did Final Fantasy suck or what?

[Scotty Xtreme]

A couple of weeks ago me and three of my friends headed to the theater to see Final Fantasy.  I really wasn't interested in the first place, but decided to give it a chance.  Boy did I make a mistake.  I thought it might be reasonably decent, taking into consideration that it took a few years to make according to my buddies.  They all thought it was good and accused me of being a moron, because they said I had to think about it to get it.  If I say anything bad about how bad the whole story to the movie sucked, they say it took a long time to do the CGI crap or whatever they used to make that snooze fest. Just because something looks pretty doesn't make it a good movie.  That movie just flat out sucked.  Who agrees with me?

[Cloudio]

I  agree, and that is very dissapointing to say because I really enjoy the video games of the same name.
I think all the time and effort was put into the CGI and not into the script...
It would have been better if it would have followed the story of one of the games, like part VII for instance...but then again I am just a Final Fantasy VII mark.

[Squishy]

I haven't seen it, primarily because the stuff in the trailers suffered from "hidden lip-sync syndrome"--a tendency in animation to obscure characters' mouths with hands, clothing, armor, assorted objects, or extreme, eyes-only close-ups so the dialogue doesn't have to match the lips. It doesn't work.

Maybe the actual movie doesn't have so much of that, but I spend about an hour a night cursing at Tekken Tag Tournament and DOA 2, and while their graphics may not be as flawlessly realistic as the stuff in Final Fantasy The Spirits Within, they're a lot more colorful and engaging than the dark, bleak, shelled-out look of FFTSW. Hell, FFTSW didn't look one iota as fun or fanciful as the TV ads for the Final Fantasy games.

The fact that the trailer and title give away the movie's idea of a "surprise" didn't help. Is there one unique thing in the entirety of the script of this movie? Something that hasn't been done a hundred times before? The trailer suggests a multi-million-dollar cartoon version of a cheap-ass post-apocalypse movie that swipes liberally from Aliens and about a dozen other movies.  

CGI is a terrific tool. It's not the beginning and ending of what a movie should be. FFTSW is probably going to become the ultimate negative example of that rule...but no, I haven't seen it.

[Gerry]

At the risk of being blasted, I actually liked it.  Sure much of it was derivative, but there was some original stuff too.  I really dug the alien creature.  They were cool!

[AndyC]

I liked it too, which was strange, because I generally hate CGI effects.

I wouldn\'t call it great, but it was an entertaining little story, with lots of action and some nifty looking aliens.

Never having played the games, I had no expectations. I really wasn\'t expecting much at all, which I think was why I found it to be a satisfying bit of entertainment.  That seems to be the way I\'m judging new movies lately — was it better or worse than I expected.  A lot of much better movies suffer from too much hype, and thus I am constantly disappointed.

Only two serious complaints with Final Fantasy:

1 - Some of the casting was not very well done.  Steve Buscemi\'s voice does not sound natural coming out of a rough, tough soldier. Neither does Peri Gilpin\'s. Every time she spoke, I thought \"Roz!\"  I also felt that the general (I forget who voiced him) would have been better done by someone like Michael Ironside. I think when you make a cartoon character more lifelike, and it starts to resemble a real person, viewers might have more expectations with regard to the voice.

2 - I got tired of all that new agey s**t about Gaia very quickly.

[Squishy]

...of course, I forgot to mention that Shrek, which started out with a fleshed-out story, good casting, and THEN a buttload of CGI work--on a far more reasonable budget--will stand as a positive example of using CGI as a tool instead of the movie's begin-all-end-all.

Long Live The Fart Joke!

[Gerry]

AndyC wrote:

> 2 - I got tired of all that new agey s**t about Gaia very
> quickly.

Ditto.  Especially towards the end.