25 Years Ago, The Spirits Within Banked On The Wrong Gimmick

Thanks to a fusillade of PR gibberish, major media outlets will spend the coming months pretending that so-called “AI actress” Tilly Norwood is a real phenomenon, not an exhausting stunt that will flame out after no one wants to watch a rom-com starring a dead-eyed automaton. And while the production company beyond Norwood is trying to present its creation as cutting-edge, it's actually a quarter-century behind the times.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within hit theaters 25 years ago today, and one of its supposed selling points was the presence of Aki Ross, a digital golden child destined to conquer Hollywood. Voiced by Ming-Na Wen, Ross’ starring role in Spirits Within was meant to be the first of many movie appearances. Publications like Entertainment Weekly and The New York Times dutifully went along with portraying the rise of Ross and her contemporary “synthespians” as inevitable, the latter even semi-seriously suggesting that Princess Fiona was so lifelike she could co-host The View. Long before AI vowed to disrupt Hollywood, reports warned that “Movie Stars Fear Inroads By Upstart Digital Actors.” Somehow, Tom Hanks’ career survived.

Given Final Fantasy’s colossal cultural status, it seems odd to have marketed Spirits Within with Maxim spreads of its “versatile young actress” rather than ads that said something like, “Hey, dorks, we made a Final Fantasy movie.” But while FF was certainly no small thing in 2001, it hadn’t conquered the mainstream so much as it had enthralled the increasingly large subset of gamers who knew what Famitsu was and were willing to argue about its scoring methods on GameFAQs. Released five months before Final Fantasy X hit North America and helped move PlayStation 2s like Japanese hotcakes, The Spirits Within was a $142 million movie that didn’t seem to know who its audience was.

Set in 2065, Earth is a wasteland thanks to constant assaults by phantoms, ghost-like aliens that arrived decades ago via meteor. Humanity survives in shielded cities, and has recently completed a super-weapon meant to eradicate its foe. But Ross and Dr. Sid (Donald Sutherland) warn that the weapon will do more harm than good, and that the solution really lies in some techno-spiritual gibberish involving the collection of eight special lifeforms dubbed spirits.

A near-future Earth was a jarring setting that disconnected Spirits Within from the franchise it was supposedly part of, because it’s difficult to imagine the fan thrilled to see the series finally go to Tucson. Released between the fantasy-forward IX and X, Spirits Within most closely resembles the sci-fi cityscape of FFVII. But even that epic saw Cloud race Chocobos and run around with a giant sword; aside from esoteric talk of life-forces, Spirits is a military sci-fi so painfully generic that its full name just feels like another marketing ploy.

Some of the franchise’s long-running themes are present, but the movie’s other problem is that it’s really, really boring. Often vague yet still drowning in exposition, first-time director Hironobu Sakaguchi struggled to apply his legendary game design experience to a new medium. The action is ponderous, there’s little sense of pace, and Ross, the “star,” was a dud. Sakaguchi apparently screamed “Flatter! Less emotional!” at Ming-Na Wen until she started simulating speech-to-text software. Not that she had much to work with; the dialogue was so stilted it could have worked for Cirque du Soleil.

The whole affair feels like Aliens written by hippies, and while undeniably impressive for 2001, it all looks so drab. It’s so lacking FF’s sense of whimsy that while you can tell the movie is trying to make a statement about environmentalism and anti-militarism, you just want to take control and shoot something. Tellingly, most positive reviews — including a strong endorsement from Roger Ebert, who compared the visuals to the advent of talkies — amounted to “Yeah, it’s nonsense, but look at it!” Released just six years after Toy Story, its lifelike human characters really did feel like a technological leap forward. Today, though, it feels like watching a 100-minute demo for an old graphics card. Maybe the reporters who wrote about Ross’ “slender fingers” and “sweat-streaked cheeks” just needed a cold shower.

Released before CGI became more powerful and Final Fantasy became more mainstream, Spirits Within feels like proof of concept for the wrong future. Time said that even if the movie was a dud, the “disturbing photorealistic visage” of its characters would help it be remembered as “the moment true CG actors were born.” But while CGI certainly became omnipresent, cross-property creations like Ross did not. The overemphasis on Ross as the star of the future now feels like a misguided gambit to win over new fans, but The Spirits Within ultimately lost so much money that it doomed Square’s nascent film company. Much was made of how long it took just to render Ross’ hair; little was said about how much time was spent on the script.

Final Fantasy is now big enough that, if Square were to try again today, it really could just say, “Hey, dorks, we made an FF movie,” without needing to claim that it was reinventing filmmaking, too. Maybe we’re wrong, and Norwood-like abominations are now the freakish future. But while potent CGI has long been commonplace, we’re not demanding that the leads of K-Pop Demon Hunters appear in a grounded drama, or that the star of Hoppers record a pop album. Thirty years after William Gibson wrote about digital celebrities, the closest the West has to an Idoru are the Minions and some VTubers. Whatever digital future filmmaking holds can’t be astroturfed into existence, whether by Square or the inane firm that conjured Norwood into un-life. In 2001, professor Marsha Kinder told the Times that, “In our postmodern culture, a simulacrum is not only acceptable, it is preferable.” Aki Ross’ agent would disagree.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is streaming on Netflix.