May contain spoilers.
I realize that my friend Mason will probably not be too thrilled to lionized in infamy like this, but I have to include him in this review of Final Fantasy. About a month and a half before this film came out, we were being bombarded with commercials for it. I took one look at the trailer for the movie and said to myself, and then my wife, that this was going to fail and fail miserably. To me it looked like a cross between Aliens and T-2. The commercial and the trailer even went so far as to rip off some direct shots from Aliens and plot devices from T-2. If that was what the film was going to be about then there is no way it was going to succeed. People are stupid sometimes but not all of the time and anyone could see that this film was priding itself on the fact that it was the first film to be filmed completely on a computer. Great, but what they forgot was that the story was nothing that we haven't seen before. Here is the premise, a bunch of renegade soldiers are sent to a planet to stop a bunch of aliens or creatures from ruining what is left of Earth. You have a Linda Hamilton clone from T-2. You have every one of the important characters from Aliens basically cloned right down to Alec Baldwin playing Hicks, Buscemi playing Hudson and Terri Gilpin playing Vasquez. There was not one original idea in here so all they had to go on was the fact that they were computer animated and that they were one of the biggest video games around. So back to Mason. He was so confident that this was going to do well, he bet me that this film would make about 120 million dollars at the N.A. box office. I thought it would do something similar to last years box disaster, A.E. I guessed less than 35 million. Guess who was right?
There are many reasons why Final Fantasy failed. One of them is that the film just plain sucked. I finally took my 8 year old step son to see the film and he is big fan of the video game. I myself am a pretty big fan of video games but have never really heard of Final Fantasy. So I sucked it up and antied up the $20.00 and went.
To sum it up, we were both confused by what was happening, unamused at the humour and generally had no interest in the story or what was going on in this fictional world. When we left, Jonathin turned to me and asked me if I liked it? I replied no. He then began asking me questions hoping I could explain the plot to him. This happens in certain films that we see together. Questions were plentiful when we saw Mission Impossible 2 together. But this time, it was me asking him questions as well, hoping that his knowledge of the video game could help me comprehend what we just spent my twenty bucks on. But to no avail.
Final Fantasy was destined to fail when they made it look like Aliens, T2 and the Abyss. James Cameron should actually sue them for whatever money they are going to make off this film because there is not a single line in this film that doesn't seem to come from James' vernacular. When films try to sell you on a gimmick, and not the actual film itself, then they are, in my opinion, destined for failure. When Toy Story was launched, it included box office heavyweights like Tom Hanks and Tim Allen. And they were not telling us to see this movie because it was stop computer animation. They were selling us on the story and the actors. Final Fantasy did the complete opposite. The tag line wasn't even about the movie itself, it was about their break-through in computer graphics.
UNLEASH A NEW REALITY.
This should be a tag line for the new Microsoft 1.21 gigawats time machine or something, but not a tag line for a film. This 120 million dollar effort deserved to fail and Square pictures should now go back to the drawing board and try to fix (in a hurry ) what they did wrong here.
0.5 out of 10--That being for Buscemi and Rhames supplying the voices of the soldiers. I hope they made a lot of money doing this abomination.
One good thing did come out of this--and that was that Mason had to eat crow and admit that he was wrong. He also owes me a movie, and I'll be sure to collect.
I realize that my friend Mason will probably not be too thrilled to lionized in infamy like this, but I have to include him in this review of Final Fantasy. About a month and a half before this film came out, we were being bombarded with commercials for it. I took one look at the trailer for the movie and said to myself, and then my wife, that this was going to fail and fail miserably. To me it looked like a cross between Aliens and T-2. The commercial and the trailer even went so far as to rip off some direct shots from Aliens and plot devices from T-2. If that was what the film was going to be about then there is no way it was going to succeed. People are stupid sometimes but not all of the time and anyone could see that this film was priding itself on the fact that it was the first film to be filmed completely on a computer. Great, but what they forgot was that the story was nothing that we haven't seen before. Here is the premise, a bunch of renegade soldiers are sent to a planet to stop a bunch of aliens or creatures from ruining what is left of Earth. You have a Linda Hamilton clone from T-2. You have every one of the important characters from Aliens basically cloned right down to Alec Baldwin playing Hicks, Buscemi playing Hudson and Terri Gilpin playing Vasquez. There was not one original idea in here so all they had to go on was the fact that they were computer animated and that they were one of the biggest video games around. So back to Mason. He was so confident that this was going to do well, he bet me that this film would make about 120 million dollars at the N.A. box office. I thought it would do something similar to last years box disaster, A.E. I guessed less than 35 million. Guess who was right?
There are many reasons why Final Fantasy failed. One of them is that the film just plain sucked. I finally took my 8 year old step son to see the film and he is big fan of the video game. I myself am a pretty big fan of video games but have never really heard of Final Fantasy. So I sucked it up and antied up the $20.00 and went.
To sum it up, we were both confused by what was happening, unamused at the humour and generally had no interest in the story or what was going on in this fictional world. When we left, Jonathin turned to me and asked me if I liked it? I replied no. He then began asking me questions hoping I could explain the plot to him. This happens in certain films that we see together. Questions were plentiful when we saw Mission Impossible 2 together. But this time, it was me asking him questions as well, hoping that his knowledge of the video game could help me comprehend what we just spent my twenty bucks on. But to no avail.
Final Fantasy was destined to fail when they made it look like Aliens, T2 and the Abyss. James Cameron should actually sue them for whatever money they are going to make off this film because there is not a single line in this film that doesn't seem to come from James' vernacular. When films try to sell you on a gimmick, and not the actual film itself, then they are, in my opinion, destined for failure. When Toy Story was launched, it included box office heavyweights like Tom Hanks and Tim Allen. And they were not telling us to see this movie because it was stop computer animation. They were selling us on the story and the actors. Final Fantasy did the complete opposite. The tag line wasn't even about the movie itself, it was about their break-through in computer graphics.
UNLEASH A NEW REALITY.
This should be a tag line for the new Microsoft 1.21 gigawats time machine or something, but not a tag line for a film. This 120 million dollar effort deserved to fail and Square pictures should now go back to the drawing board and try to fix (in a hurry ) what they did wrong here.
0.5 out of 10--That being for Buscemi and Rhames supplying the voices of the soldiers. I hope they made a lot of money doing this abomination.
One good thing did come out of this--and that was that Mason had to eat crow and admit that he was wrong. He also owes me a movie, and I'll be sure to collect.