Video games and movies: Is there a light at the end of this long, dark and terrible tunnel?
Then recently, I re-visited Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and I felt comforted afterwards. I felt optimistic. Like...it was all going to be okay.
ALRIGHT. I heard your grumbling from here. Let me explain. Square Enix did something that many gaming companies didn’t or couldn’t do. (Whether or not it was a good movie. Or had anything to do with the Final Fantasy stories we all love.) It was the first photo-realistic motion picture. Ever. Yes, Pixar and Dreamworks made films as well, but never to the extent of where SquareEnix went. In fact, some say that was why the movie didn’t do as well as they planned. The CGI was so good, that moviegoers expressed discomfort while watching the animated actors. Some even went as far to say it was creepy. Nowadays, we don’t think twice about CGI, but for 1998, it was a real shocker. It was the first movie of it’s kind and from a technical standpoint, it was groundbreaking. Unfortunately, the movie didn’t go over as well as SquareEnix had planned. Sony funneled millions of dollars into the project and after four years it came out and bombed.It wasn’t necessarily that the story was flat, or that the voice acting was average, (the cast was great) it was the timing of the movie. (For Chris’ sake there are way worse movies that were box office hits.*cough* Twilight *cough*) Director Hironobu Sakaguchi was a little ahead of his time in my opinion. Had he released such a movie within the last couple years, it would have been received differently. Maybe not as a widely renowned hit, but not as a monetary blunder either. Sadly, many speculate that the company was never quite the same afterwards. (Final Fantasy XIII...*sighs*) But despite the financial failure of the movie, it did prove something: Gamer movies can be done right.
