Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is a story about post-apocalyptic Earth, which has been devastated by a seeming invasion of aliens called Phantoms. One touch from Phantoms removes the soul from humans. Aki Ross has been dreaming about the Phantoms and believes she can solve the invasion. It’s a straightforward story, mostly because the story isn’t the main focus of the movie.

The focus for this movie was technological revolution. This was the first CGI feature film intended to look photorealistic. While Dreamworks and Pixar were making more stylized kids’ movies, studio Square hoped to create digital actors whose performances would be comparable to living actors. Aki’s model in particular was intended for multiple movie projects. This never happened, aside from a single demo made with the Aki model to land the Final Flight of the Osiris project.

Square’s ambitions sank the studio: costs went out of control, movie audiences didn’t love the project, and The Spirits Within bombed. They never got to make another full length movie.

The Final Fantasy franchise has always been about creative discontent driving artists to reach for their ambitions. From the Wikipedia article: “Though often attributed to the company allegedly facing bankruptcy, Sakaguchi explained that the game was his personal last-ditch effort in the game industry and that its title, Final Fantasy, stemmed from his feelings at the time; had the game not sold well, he would have quit the business and gone back to college.”

Creator Sakaguchi threw everything he could scrape together at The Spirits Within, and you can tell. Compare it to other CGI from the year 2001. Fiona from Shrek is a great comparison in terms of hair and skin; you’ll notice the lighting and designs are much more stylistic. Pixar’s Monster’s Inc was a contemporary. Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius is contemporary too. The much-humbler and lower-budget Barbie and the Nutcracker also came from 2001 and is more representative of commercial CGI.

These movies are all wonderful in their ways, but The Spirits Within was on a level unto itself. Note the efforts toward naturalistic lighting and realistic movement. Nowadays it looks like a video game cut scene. It compares unfavorably to, say, Death Stranding’s cut scenes, and maybe Baldur’s Gate 3’s in-game rendering. Both of them look more modern in style and quality, but you’d expect that after twenty years. Twenty years! A studio managed to put out a movie that was almost twenty years ahead of what video games would later accomplish.

The Spirits Within took four years for its team to create, amounting to many many terabytes of footage, and what would now be a $200 million budget to achieve. It’s hard to comprehend the kind of machinery it took to create The Spirits Within. They were using Maya and RenderMan, whereas your laptop can spit out the BG3 footage with hardly a fan-spin to recognize the effort.

Back when this movie came out, I was thirteen-years-old. From ages fourteen through eighteen, I was doing 3D Computer Graphic Design classes at my high school, where I ultimately became a teacher’s assistant. We weren’t taught by anyone who knew anything about 3D. Our teacher did photography. The technology was just too new. But they equipped us with Lightwave, Maya-comparable software, and let us loose. I couldn’t possibly overstate the impact seeing The Spirits Within had on my nascent artistic development. I spent those four years trying to create the Phantoms (as well as the Gungan bubble cities from Star Wars). I absolutely obsessed over what Sakaguchi’s team accomplished.

And I wasn’t the only admirer. The motion capture process used for the models was so good, they brought the mocap guy over to Lord of the Rings to work on Gollum. Andy Serkis’s performance as Gollum is definitive; it spawned an entire profession of mocap artists within cinema.

I’ll note that Gollum was photorealistic enough to perform with human cast mates in photorealistic settings. At the time, we thought this would be the future of movies. What’s actually happened is that we mostly use human actors against CGI environments (although this example video also has CGI Stormtroopers). Technology has also since progressed to turn human performances into CGI-tuned simulacra, prominently used for things like de-aging or resurrecting dead actors.

The Spirits Within was a major stepping stone for all of this, though it has now mostly been forgotten.

That’s because the movie really works best as a tech demo. It never gets lost in its story and becomes unselfaware of itself as an historic CGI creation.

Lingering shots on Aki are clearly meant to give us opportunities to admire her vividly realized model. A lot of shots feel unnecessary, mostly because they’re showing us something that is impressive for the technology of the time. And then there are some odd moments where they seem to have edited in shots because they couldn’t afford to do a more expensive angle on the scene (hair was *so difficult*).

Loving work was put into Aki, but the other characters kinda blur together. Many are kept in full-body suits due to the limitations of rendering the complex multilayered look of human skin. The romantic hero, Gray, would be basically indistinguishable from the villain if not for their different costumes. The vehicles and CGI-rendered environments also have a certain sparse sterility that reminds me of the original Mass Effect. Many environments aren’t CGI at all, but matte paintings. These were all necessary sacrifices. But you can tell where the most effort was focused.

The screenplay suffered for this tech demo focus. The dialogue is stilted to the point where it sounds like the English track is a dub — but it’s actually an English original. Great actors do their best to work with it, but it’s b-movie dialogue at best. The story structure is okay. The concept is Studio Ghibli-esque without the detail, humanity, or wonder. Movies at the time had vastly better screenplays. This is somewhere Shrek absolutely trounced Spirits Within. And if you look at recent years of cinema, like the bangers of 1999, you can see how spoiled we were for amazing story.

The marketing also did a disservice to The Spirits Within. They spent a lot of time talking about the photorealism, when that was the goal, but not really achievable. It got a lot of people hung up on the uncanny valley effect. Honestly, I think this is where I first heard the term “uncanny valley.” Moviegoers were looking at extremely sophisticated CGI and told to receive it as film, and that just wasn’t going to work. And they really couldn’t resist sexualizing Aki Ross, who was the first nonexistent person to appear on Maxim’s Hot 100 list. The movie itself is not sexy. People were disappointed on a few axes.

It’s fair to say that The Spirits Within didn’t age well, but that would imply it was good in its time — most people didn’t think so. Roger Ebert appreciated it. I also defended it with the passion only a thirteen-year-old can muster. And while I was absolutely delighted to rewatch it (I still love! it! so! much!), my own thirteen-year-old offspring was deeply unimpressed. This kid regarded it as a bad old video game cut scene, or maybe a project one guy made on his computer on the weekends. And they laughed out loud at the dialogue.

I’m not sure I’d recommend The Spirits Within to anyone who doesn’t have a particular interest in CGI’s relationship with cinema throughout history, no matter how much I adore the movie. And I do. It’s a great piece of mostly forgotten history that has resonated throughout the decades since. A lot of what we love owes thanks to The Spirits Within for its technological stretch.

(image credit: Sony Pictures Releasing)

In the sequel to Alien (1979), our story brings us back to Ripley some fifty-seven years after she entered stasis. It turns out colonists have settled the Zeta Reticuli planet where she initially encountered the alien. She returns with a group of Colonial Marines when the colonists disappear. She plans to exterminate the aliens they find, but of course the corporation does not, and hijinks ensue.

I’m still trying to parse my negative reaction to the movie. I can recognize many good points in it: Sigourney Weaver is great, the action scenes with Ripley vs the Queen are very enjoyable, and the aesthetic surrounding the aliens is still delicious. Yet I found myself largely bored and annoyed while I was actually watching it.

I knew to expect an action movie rather than horror this time around. I do vastly prefer horror. But one of my favorite infinite-rewatch movies is Die Hard (1988), so I had good reason to suspect I wouldn’t mind the shift in genre. Aliens lacks the engaging dialogue and methodically escalated stakes of Die Hard. You really can’t understate how much the dynamic between McClain and Gruber pulls the movie along. As cool as the Xenomorph queen looks, she lacks the gravitas of Alan Rickman. Carter Burke, the resident Weyland-Yutani wiener who serves as primary antagonist for much of the movie, is not all that interesting either.

So Die Hard wasn’t a good comparison (and Aliens couldn’t have been in conversation with it, as Die Hard came two years later).

It seems likelier that Aliens was some kind of improvement over older action movies. It earned quite a bit of cultural cachet in its time, including memes that have persisted to this day (“nuke it from orbit”), so something here hit hard. I just don’t know what. I’m just not all that familiar with its subgenre. I’m guessing that having a woman-led action movie by the guy who wrote Rambo II and Terminator was exciting.

And boy, is Ripley a woman in Aliens. She was androgynous in the first movie. Themes of reproduction weren’t especially played up then. By the time Aliens comes around, they’ve left Ripley’s cat somewhere safe (thankfully) and replaced her with a small child, whose nurturing falls exclusively on Ripley’s shoulders. Ripley is also put against an alien mother as her ultimate foe. The woman-as-childbearer aspect has been pulled into focus. I vaguely recall the few later-franchise movies I saw, and it seems the reproductive stuff only gets increasing importance.

Believe it or not, this came out only twelve years after women could have credit cards under their names in America, so I can appreciate how second wave feminism might have enjoyed it.

The Marines were generally obnoxious, though. The action scenes with the Marines in them were muddy and incoherent — possibly as a way to emphasize the emotional chaos of the situation — and their machismo leading into the battles got tiring. I suspect some of what I “missed” may be an expectation the Marines would be more useful, better-regarded, and survive even a little bit. Without that expectation, there was very little pleasure in watching them fall apart.

I really suspect I need to revisit this movie as part of a bigger self-education on 80s action movies. It will probably come across better that way. In the meantime, I am comfortable rating it three stars because Sigourney Weaver did her job excellently, “Chekhov’s Mech Suit” was fun (as my child termed it), and I really do always love the alien aesthetic.

I last rewatched Shakespeare in Love almost exactly a year ago, so I wasn’t exactly overdue another review. But that was before I started doing movie reviews on Egregious. My last review is shorter, as tends to be preferred on Letterboxd.

A very clever movie, which unfortunately *knows* it is a very clever movie. In the days before Gwyneth Paltrow’s x-ray vagina eggs or whatever, she was just an adorable, horny, cross-dressing lil scamp trying to climb up on Ralph Fiennes’s hairier brother while popping off repurposed Shakespeare lines. There’s enough cross-dressing that they couldn’t make it wholly heterosexual, but they made a sincere effort. I can’t hate a movie that had *this* much fun being made, though I also cannot love it, despite the incredibly meta self-awareness of writing tragi-comedy like Shakespeare was a screenwriter in the 1990s.

“Great score and costumes.” -me and also The Oscars

(posted 3/23/23 on Letterboxd)

This was accompanied by a three-star rating. I don’t disagree with my original review so much, but I feel like I was generous in giving it three stars based on how I felt. My takeaway was negative in general. I found it way too “cute” last time. It was jarring to me, since I grew up loving the movie. For a ten-year-old literature nerd in 1998, Shakespeare in Love is fabulous. As an adult, I couldn’t get the same experience.

I was compelled to revisit it because Martin Clunes, star of the best show ever, plays a significant character. Coming at this from an I Love Martin Clunes angle had me looking closer at all the performances.

What a cast! Obviously we have Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes as the central relationship. The rest of the cast list is absurdly stacked: Our Savior Martin Clunes, Geoffrey Rush unrecognizable as the dude from Quills, Imelda Staunton, a deliciously villainous Colin Firth, Rupert Everett, and of course Dame Judi Dench as the Queen. Also, bafflingly but charmingly, J.Lo’s husband.

There are surely other noteworthy actors in the movie; it seems to be mostly cast with English actors and I’m not as familiar with non-Hollywood actors in general, hence my failure to recognize Martin Clunes as The Greatest until now.

On the performance level, I don’t see anything to criticize. Even Ben Affleck, who sticks out to say the least, is entirely appropriate for his character. I should have actually closed out my last review by saying “Great score, costumes, and cast.” The Oscars agreed with me on that too. Paltrow and Dench both took home statuettes.

Rory pointed out to me that the Oscars attention was not merit-based, but politics based, as major awards demand. Weinstein himself mounted an aggressive campaign. Yikes.

But Shakespeare in Love was primed to appeal to Hollywood anyway: Its anachronistic take on Shakespeare is extremely indulgent to the industry’s favorite things.

In much the way there’s always a dog in plays to appease the Queen, this movie panders hard. Shakespeare himself is the best example. His character is sent to therapy right at the beginning of the movie, which is the most 1990s-tortured-screenwriter act they could have done. You’re immediately, firmly placed in an anachronistic state of mind, which would have made all the characterizations more meaningful to Oscar voters at the time. Producers are selfish, screwing around, and must be wrangled. Writers are flighty and insecure. Actors are deeply, reverently committed to their art, and also totally unreliable ego-monsters.

For all my annoyance at the cutesy way-too-clever screenplay, that’s a lot of the reason it’s successful. It might rub my fur the wrong way now, but it’s excellent at what it seeks to accomplish. Part of that is awards-bait. Part of that is the fart-sniffing of Hollywood. But the most significant part, to me, is how it seeks to prove that all the mechanisms and tropes of Shakespeare’s era are rather timeless, because it tells you cynically what parts of a story will please audiences, and then…it executes those parts of the story to please audiences. Successfully!

Still, I don’t love it as I used to. The Queen connecting with Viola because they’re both struggling to survive in a man’s world falls as totally flat as Barbie’s shallow feminism 101, designed only to recognize the struggles of wealthy white women. Using Romeo and Juliet as an example of “true love” is silly and simply untrue. The play isn’t even about true love. It’s about a couple kids who impulsively fall into an intense relationship, and how their family’s grudges kill them. More of a warning than a love story or comedy. Plus, Shakespeare in Love tries very hard to avoid being gay, like all the No Homo Media of the 90s and 00s, which always sends me sinking down a dark hole remembering the homophobic abuse endured at the time.

I still think it’s better than I felt last year. Its sustained impact is mostly harmless, though the abusive shadow of Weinstein looms large over this and many films. Shakespeare in Love is just trying to have fun and entertain you. The costumes are really beautiful. The score is outstanding. The actors are all so good, and Martin Clunes is great (don’t @ me).

Also, I appreciate how a quick rewatch reminded me how much my mood at any given moment really impacts how generous I feel about a movie. Thanks, smug little Hollywood movie.

(image credit: Miramax)