The thing that struck me about FINAL FANTASY is how unoriginal the script is : A female scientist is saved from an alien menace by a mixed sex multi ethnic military team . There's a couple of close scrapes followed by some techno babble and obvious exposition about saving Planet Earth with a blatant baddie on the human side a closed mind military type and all the good humans open minded scientists . There's some flirting with lines like
" Get yourself a girlfriend "
" I'm working on that "
before the heroes take part in a very spectacular climax .
It sounds like every Sci-Fi block buster ever made in the last 20 years and to be honest I was reminded of both ALIENS and STARSHIP TROOPERS more than a few times
But FINAL FANTASY wasn't produced or marketed as a groundbreaking plot - It was marketed as a groundbreaking CGI movie , and I thought as entertainment it succeeded in pleasing this viewer . Of course movies with vast amounts of CGI like the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy only work when you don't realize you're watching CGI and in this respect FINAL FANTASY is a failure and it's not helped by the characters voiced by James Woods and Donald Sutherland looking nothing like the two actors ( Did anyone else think Sutherland's scientist looked exactly like Robert Englund ? ) though to be fair at least the dialog was synchronised with the animated mouths and the sound editing and sound effects are superb and despite everything it is entertaining
Seven out of ten
" Get yourself a girlfriend "
" I'm working on that "
before the heroes take part in a very spectacular climax .
It sounds like every Sci-Fi block buster ever made in the last 20 years and to be honest I was reminded of both ALIENS and STARSHIP TROOPERS more than a few times
But FINAL FANTASY wasn't produced or marketed as a groundbreaking plot - It was marketed as a groundbreaking CGI movie , and I thought as entertainment it succeeded in pleasing this viewer . Of course movies with vast amounts of CGI like the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy only work when you don't realize you're watching CGI and in this respect FINAL FANTASY is a failure and it's not helped by the characters voiced by James Woods and Donald Sutherland looking nothing like the two actors ( Did anyone else think Sutherland's scientist looked exactly like Robert Englund ? ) though to be fair at least the dialog was synchronised with the animated mouths and the sound editing and sound effects are superb and despite everything it is entertaining
Seven out of ten