It wasnt bad i guess it just was not what i was expecting for a Final Fantasy movie. Thought it would be more like the games.

I find it funny that almost noone on here seems to like it. There seems to be a lot of people defending it when it's been discussed on other forums. Personally i find it worthless, and it has nothing to do with the FF series.

As a Final Fantasy movie The Spirits within was poor. It had a lack of anything Final Fantasy besides from a guy called Cid (which they spelt differently and called it "Sid"!). It was too americanised as well. Lacked anything as cultural to Japan (if not their take on European history and fantasy) as the FF series normally does.

As a Starship Trooper movie, it would have been ok though. Soldiers fighting bug like ghostly alien invaders...

Nothing to do with final fantasy. what a pile of garbage. They just threw the name so people could watch it and how misleading

I really do find it surprising that people are saying it has nothing to do with final fantasy. I think the story line is very FF like, the only thing that's not really like FF is the fight/battle scenes, which does work with the movie. It is a good movie.

I didn't really like the movie, it was too deep for me to understand when I first saw it. And I was very dissapointed that there was absolutely no magic. It didn't really scream Final Fantasy. However, I think that if I were to watch it again now, I'd probably appreciate it more for the underlying themes. I was upset about the ending though, and I would have prefered if that Sid guy died instead of the main hero.

Not technically true =/ The entire premise is based on a Japanese idea that when one dies, their spirit is sent to another planet/star. The movie spun that around cleverly and made Earth the planet that ANOTHER race's spirits ended up going. It was quite clever.

I guess I'm a bit disappointed that a lot of people think the best parts of Final Fantasy are magic and swords. You can get magic and swords in so many other franchises. A lot of people also loved FFVII:AC, which is just full of fights and a terrible story.

There are so many reasons why The Spirits Within is MORE like Final Fantasy than Advent Children. AC just raped it using pre-established FF names and locations. The story was rubbish and the fights were silly.

Spirits Within had the FF ideals that the earth is a living creature (Called 'Gaia', as in FF9), as well as a bitter-sweet ending, a clever twist as to what the threat to Earth really was, a premise based on Japanese views and a villian who wasn't technically a bad guy, just someone with a different dramatic view on how to save the Earth.

The truth of the matter is, it's nerds who find the AC movie a better movie. People who haven't played FF at all would actually prefer Spirits Within (In most cases).

My final gripe is that AC seemed to forget that most of us who first played FF7 were teenagers or kids then, but we're grown up now, so why did the movie come across so focused for teens? It really is an immature movie and I apologise for my harsh words, but I'm bitter!!

Rant over. Sorry guys!

Perhaps. But the whole film seemed too American really.. It was even set in New York! (Or New New York). It didn't *look* or *feel* like a Final Fantasy or culturally Japanese, even if there were hidden elements in the film and plot.

That's not to say that the film was rubbish. It was ok, but just not as a Final Fantasy film. It wasn't fantasy enough, the planet happened to be the one we're living on.. Basically the FF references that were in there were so subtle that it should have just been labelled as a Square movie, and the references be merely for fun (like in some games that Square also did/does). They didn't have to label it as a Final Fantasy movie and I think that it was by doing this that the movie flopped, as fans were naturally dissapointed.


You can also get New York in so many other movies! But yeah I agree that there is more to FF than swords and magic (although it is a HUGE part of it), but most of them really tend to rely on it not being set on our planet, and also having more fantasy involved.

I'm not too keen on AC either. It basically only really touched on Cloud, Sephiroth (and the 3 silver haired men), the Turks, Denzel etc...
The rest of the team were limited to short cameo's... Some of the coolest characters ever to grace the FF series were given only one or two lines, and of little importance to the story. I felt it was a sequal for the sake of a sequal (probably a bit like how I feel with all the new FF7 stuff).