Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is the first movie with the Final Fantasy name and the first attempt to make a photorealistic rendered 3D feature film. Released on July 11, 2001 by Columbia Pictures, it used a budget of $137 million dollars, but only managed to gain $85 million dollars worldwide. Considered a box office bomb, this delayed the merger between Square Co., Ltd. and Enix. Despite this, the film had received nominations for five different awards and the main character herself received considerable media coverage in the debuting year.

Sharing very few aspects with the Final Fantasy series it has been speculated as to why this film even carries the brand name. The story follows scientists Aki Ross and Doctor Sid in their efforts to free Earth from a deadly alien race known as the Phantoms, which has driven surviving humanity into barrier cities. They must compete against General Douglas Hein, who wishes to attack the aliens with the Zeus space cannon to end the conflict.

Plot
The year is 2065 AD. The Earth is infested with alien spirits, and mankind faces total extinction. The story starts with Aki Ross onboard her ship, the Black Boa waking up from a dream about the Phantoms. After she records her dream, she lands in Old New York City, on a mission to find the 6th spirit. She continues looking until she runs into some Phantoms, and it appears that she is about to be killed until a squad known as Deep Eyes, led by an old acquaintance of hers, Captain Gray Edwards, arrives to save her life. Despite the captain indicating to her that she is under arrest, Aki runs and eventually finds the 6th spirit, which is a plant. Back at New York, Aki talks to her mentor, Dr. Sid; she thus confirms that the plant she found is indeed the 6th spirit. Sid shows Aki a diary he wrote when he was her age, and after she has read it, he burns it, stating that their ideas are unpopular among men. Later, after waking up from another Phantom dream, Aki is drawn into a debate on whether to use the Zeus Cannon, a weapon that was designed to destroy the Phantoms. Sid argues against the use of the cannon, saying that the cannon would destroy "Gaia, the spirit of the planet". General Hein, leader of the armed forces, mocks this concept and asks for proof. Aki then shows him proof by revealing that she has been infected by the Phantoms, yet still remains alive.

Paranoid that Aki might be a spy for the Phantoms, the General orders Gray and Deep Eyes to guard Doctor Ross and report any suspicious behavior. If she acts in any way abnormal, she is to be arrested.

Dr. Ross, accompanied by the rest of the squad, then leaves the barrier city for the Tucson Wasteland, where she hopes to find the 7th spirit. After dropping energy buoys to distract the Phantoms, they descend and attempt to locate and retrieve the spirit. After a while, they find it - it is contained in the living tissues inside the back pack of a dead soldier; the organic matter within the pack had kept the spirit intact. After retrieving it, they discover that they are surrounded by Phantoms, who, apparently, have been attracted to the one located inside Dr. Ross. The squad is picked up, but the General's soldiers try to apprehend Dr. Ross. One is killed by a Phantom, and the team narrowly escapes.

General Hein, meanwhile, is desperate to gain clearance to fire the Zeus Cannon. He arrests the operators of New York's barrier and lowers the shields in a section of the city. Hein's plan is to sacrifice a small part of the population in order to convince the government that the Phantoms can breach the shields, allowing him to take necessary steps. His plan backfires, as the Phantoms are able to use plasma conduits to travel through the rest of the city. Aki and only a handful of her crew survive the resulting attack. Subsequently, Hein is floating in space, about to commit suicide, when a transmission comes in, saying that following the disaster, he is now authorized to use the Zeus cannon.

Aki and Dr Sid devise a plan to destroy the Phantoms at their heart, the Phantom crater. The plan involves Aki and Gray being lowered into the crater inside a bio-etheric shield vehicle, and finding and removing the 8th spirit, which is a Phantom. The pair have just located the Phantom when suddenly a beam from the Zeus station crashes into the crater, killing the Phantoms on the surface, including the 8th spirit. The beam leaves the vehicle shield-less and exposed to the Phantoms, which now cover the crater in response to the attack. Gray leaves the vehicle to protect Aki from the Phantoms. Meanwhile, Aki has her final vision in which a Phantom tells her that the spirit within her is in fact the 8th spirit. When Aki wakes up, she calls Gray in to use his energy pack battery to project the completed wave pattern of the eight spirits. As the projection begins, another Zeus beam penetrates the atmosphere, completely obliterating the bio-etheric shield vehicle, and triggering a massive reaction from the Phantom world's spirit, which resides in the crater. This attack, however, overloads the Zeus cannon, destroying it and killing General Hein.

With the vehicle destroyed, Gray sacrifices his own life to distribute Aki's wave, using his body to transmit it directly to the Phantom world spirit. The Phantoms transform into bright, floating orbs which return to space, and the end scene is of Aki holding Gray's body and looking into the newly liberated world.

Concept and Production
The movie's working title was simply "Gaia". During preproduction the script went through 50 incarnations. Early incarnations included a New York City divided in an "upper city" and "lower city", riot police, oxygen salesmen and dispensing machines, and even French Foreign Legion desert troops and European biohazard soldiers. In one of the incarnations, there was a small child named Meg, who had a much larger part in the overall story. In the final version of the film it is mentioned that the fifth spirit was drawn from a terminally ill child. This is the only reference to Meg left in the final version.

The total production time on the film was over four years. By the time the final shots were rendered some of the earlier ones had to be redone because they didn't match anymore. Also, the software used to create them had become more advanced (and hence more detail was possible).

Release
Before the film's release there was already skepticism of its potential to be financially successful; noted that video-game adaptations had a poor track record when it came to the box office, also noting that it was Sakaguchi's first feature film.

The film was released in the United States on July 11, 2001. In its first four weeks, the film made $32 million domestically, going on to gross $85 million in worldwide box office receipts. The film received mixed reviews, with consensus that the film "raises the bar for computer animated movies, but the story is dull and emotionally removed".

' named Aki Ross, the film's protagonist, an "", stating that "Calling this action heroine a cartoon would be like calling a Rembrandt a doodle." She was voted to be one of the sexiest women ever by ' and its readers, ranking 87th out of 100 and became the first fictional woman to ever make the list, additionally appearing on the issue's cover. Her appearance has been received positively by critics, with praise for the finer details of the character model such as the rendering of her hair. described her as having the "sinewy efficiency" of and the visual appeal of ' portrayal of, she has also been compared to the videogame character. Action and Adventure Cinema described her as among the "least overtly eroticised" female characters in science fiction.

The film was nominated for "Best Sound Editing - Animated Feature Film, Domestic and Foreign" at the  as well as "" by the Online Film Critics Society though it did not win either award.

Developers

 * Director: Hironobu Sakaguchi
 * Co-director: Moto Sakakibara
 * Producer: Jun Aida, Chris Lee
 * Scenario Writer: Hironobu Sakaguchi
 * Original music composed by: Elliot Goldenthal
 * Art Direction by: Moto Sakakibara

Connections to the Final Fantasy series
The movie was generally unpopular within the Final Fantasy community due to the very little content it featured which related to the series. However:
 * Fans have drawn parallels between the concept of Gaia and the Lifestream in Final Fantasy VII, and how ultimately it took the combined forces of the Spirits and the Planet itself to overcome the Phantoms.
 * Dr. Sid is this movie's incarnation of the Cid character in the series, despite his name being spelled with an untraditional S.
 * General Hein is named after a boss from Final Fantasy III.
 * The Chocobo shows up as cameos in three scenes:
 * Appeared in one of Aki's document folders,
 * Appeared on Aki's shirt as she wakes up from a dream,
 * Appeared as a keychain on a briefcase during the Phantom attack on New York Barrier City.
 * The alien Phantoms have at least design similarities to certain creatures in the series:
 * The flying Phantoms closely resemble the Final Fantasy VII boss Bottomswell.
 * The Phantoms crashed on Earth via a meteor. In Final Fantasy VII, Jenova also came on a meteor.
 * The Phantoms wanting to turn Earth's lifeforce into that of their own planet is somewhat similar to Garland's attempt to assimilate Gaia and Terra in Final Fantasy IX.
 * Also, the fact that the Phantoms are invisible until they are right in front of you could be an homage to the "random battle" system for fighting enemies in the older games.

Easter Eggs

 * The DVD includes some cast bloopers as well, though these can be attrubited to the animators making intentionally goofy scenes (Or in the case of the last one, the Voice Actors messing up and the Animators running with it)
 * Grey shoots through the hangar window and then knocks himself out as his attempt to jump through it fails.
 * In the scene where Neil drives through the building and crashes, the main characters emerge with debris (pipes, tools, stop signs) through their heads, and yet they continue to act as if nothing has happened.
 * In the Wasteland, Grey stumbles and accidentally shoots Aki. After realizing she's not moving, he nonchalantly sets his gun aside and starts running.
 * Aki drives her spaceship into Grey during the shoot-out in the hangar.
 * During the conference scene, Aki enters the room and smacks Sid upside the head.
 * In the final scene where Aki is solemnly carrying a dead Grey out of the Crater, she happens to sneeze, which causes both her and the "dead body" to break out into laughter.
 * For fun, the producers created a music video featuring the characters (led by Aki) performing the dance from 's (1983).
 * Before Elliot Goldenthal was brought in to compose the score, the film was temp-tracked from James Horner's score for Titanic (1997). Cues from the piece 'A Promise Kept' were borrowed for the original opening sequence and can be found on the Special Edition DVD.

Trivia

 * With a budget of $137,000,000, the movie grossed $85,131,830 on the worldwide market, gaining a loss of $94,434,085 and leading to the "retirement" of Square Pictures in October 2001, however the studio would later go on to create an animation for the in 2003, using Aki in a test movie for it.
 * Each movie frame has twice the resolution of a high-definition TV signal and contains 10 megabytes of data.
 * During the conference scene where General Hein and Dr. Sid debate how to kill the Phantoms some of the faces in the audience were modeled on the film's behind-the-scenes personnel.
 * When the movie was digitally-projected (Texas Instruments DLP), it became the first ever to include a "genuine" 8-channel Sony SDDS soundtrack. "Prototype" 8-channel soundtracks had been in use by SDDS since 1993, but the one for this movie is considered the first perfected standard of the format.
 * All backgrounds are hand painted.
 * During preproduction, the script went through 50 incarnations largely due to the conflicting tastes between the Japanese and Americans involved. In one of the incarnations there was a small child named Meg, who had a much larger part in the overall story. In the final version of the film the fifth spirit was drawn from a terminally ill child. This is the only reference to Meg left in the final version. Other characters that didn't make the final cut include a boy named Daniel and a fifth member of the Deep Eyes Squad called Robert.
 * This was ' first theatrically-released animated feature since (1986).
 * The scene in Kingdom Hearts where there is a shot of Kairi standing on water, seen from below, is a reference to an identical shot of Aki Ross standing on water.
 * A copy of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within appears on a video store shelf in The Benchwarmers (2006).
 * A movie poster of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within appears under a Zoolander movie poster in the World Trade Center (2006).