Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001): Almost a Cult Classic

There’s a certain kind of film that greets you with a firm handshake, dazzles you with charisma, and then, before you’ve even sat down, manages to trip over the coffee table. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is exactly that kind of film. It walks onto the screen in 2001 looking impossibly good. It’s beautiful and ambitious, and a technological marvel that still holds up decades later. And yet, the moment the story begins, it face-plants.

Before we go anywhere, you have to understand just how hard Square Pictures flexed here. Every frame is loaded with cutting-edge lighting, simulated strands of hair, atmospheric haze, naturalistic cloth, micro‑expressions—this was artistry on the bleeding edge. They weren’t trying to make an animated movie. They were trying to change cinema forever.

And honestly? They almost did.

But the story had other plans.

Let’s Talk About That Opening

Like no dream I’ve ever had

The film begins like a mood board: wide shots of cracked alien soil, an odd little creature skittering under Aki’s boot, and this dreamy, wandering atmosphere where you’re meant to feel curious. Instead, you feel unanchored because you don’t know who she is yet. We don’t know why she’s here. We don’t know if this is real, a memory, a prophecy, trauma, or an animated screensaver.

And then it turns out to be a dream.

Dream openings are fine when they mean something. Here, it’s just pretty noise. Aki hasn’t earned mystery yet, and we have no context to attach to the imagery. The opening monologue fails to provide any context to connect us to the first few seconds. It feels like we’re being asked to care before we’ve even been introduced.

Then comes the last line in the monologue that still makes me scratch my head:

“Will I be in time to save the Earth?”

She hits "Earth" like it’s a twist the audience wasn’t ready for. And yes, technically, we are on an alien world in that opening dream — but because the film hasn’t told us anything about her, or the dream, or the stakes, the line still lands strangely. It’s delivered like a revelation, but we don’t yet understand why it matters, or what the contrast is supposed to be. Instead of raising tension, it feels like the film is trying to sound dramatic before it has earned the right to be.

It’s melodrama without setup, like clearing your throat before saying something important… and then leaving the room. You feel like you’ve been dropped into someone else’s dream journal without the notes.

This film needed to open with a threat, not a dream sequence about the concept of having dreams.

The World Doesn’t Look Like It’s Dying

Aki calmly tells us the phantoms arrived 34 years ago. Three and a half decades! Long enough to reshape an entire civilisation. Long enough for cities to bear scars, for people to feel worn down, for infrastructure to be patched together from what’s left.

Instead, Barrier City looks like a newly polished airport terminal.

Clean metal, intact towers, smooth surfaces, functioning power grids and holographic displays. It’s sterile in a way that betrays the premise. If humanity has been fighting for survival for decades, the world should look like it’s fighting back.

Come to think of it, the world is flat, with only the foreground characters taking part in it. There aren’t any background conversations with civilians, no distant arguments, station announcements or radio chatter, nothing that makes the world feel lived in. It’s as if the entire planet is waiting quietly offstage until the main cast arrives.

This becomes a pattern: the script insists on catastrophe, but the visuals never show it. 

Aki Ross

Awesome graphics for the day

A Character Who Looks Real but Never Quite Feels Alive.

Aki Ross was never designed to be just a protagonist. She was designed to be a digital actor, a reusable asset for future films. Square talked openly about her being the next Hollywood star.

And that’s exactly how she comes across: exquisitely crafted, but emotionally adrift.

Her personality is gentle but indistinct. Her motivations exist, but only vaguely. Her emotional arc is so soft you practically have to push your ear to the screen to hear it. She’s art without authorship; technically human, narratively hollow, like casting a rom-com extra to play a cyberpunk messiah.

She’s the face of the story, but never the heartbeat.

The Deep Eyes Look Incredible, Until…

When the Deep Eyes squad arrives, it’s electric. They crash onto the scene with the confidence of elite soldiers. Heavy armour, tactical presence, perfect silhouettes—this should be the moment the movie plants its boots.

Then they open their mouths.

The dialogue is threadbare. Bland and placeholder quality. There’s no chain‑of‑command sharpness, no camaraderie sold through personality, nothing to distinguish one from another except the voice actors we recognise behind them. And with a cast like Baldwin, Buscemi, Ming‑Na, and Ving Rhames, that’s a waste.

Great animation. Empty characterisation.

Armour That Makes No Sense

Knives, heavy shotguns and armour to fight ghosts

Their gear is another example of style overpowering logic. Shoulder‑knives? Reinforced shotgun stocks? Heavy plating? Sure—if you’re fighting creatures with bones.

But phantoms glide through everything.

They pass through steel, through walls, flesh, and armour.

So why are these soldiers marching around like they’re about to knife-fight a rhinoceros?

And the movie even proves its own design wrong. Around the 41-minute mark, soldiers try to detain Aki on a transport ship and during a fight with the Deep Eyes, their helmet visors flicker, and the suits short-circuit from basic punches and shoves, even one is incapacitated from being struck in the throat.

The armour isn’t just useless against ghosts—it’s useless in general.

The Phantoms Don’t Feel Immediately Dangerous

These creatures are supposed to be terrifying. They rip out souls! They ended civilisation! And they are the reason humanity lives behind shields!

But we don’t actually see them do anything until approximately 38 minutes in.

This is a baffling choice. Their soul-eating ability should’ve opened the movie. Instead, we get three-quarters of the movie of shimmering shapes, meandering action, confused gunfire, and no sense of what the stakes are.

A threat isn’t scary if the audience doesn’t know what it does. The phantoms might as well be glowing jellyfish.

Science Without Rules Is Just Flashy Noise

Aki extracting/killing off a phantom “infection”

Aki’s bio‑etheric laser procedure is gorgeous to look at. It glows, and hums. It really looks like it’s doing something important, and the outcome saves a person, but the film doesn’t explain how it works until they find a power source that is a life spirit much later in the movie. If the story has a rough idea of how technology works, it has to be set up early—Etheric energy, that’s how our tech works—cool, but that’s nice to know before the story bulldozes on.

Then we have to ask, why is Aki doing the emergency procedure?

If there's a medical station for such an important purpose, why isn't there a medic?

It’s narrative theatre—animation standing in for answers.

Aki Walks Through Quarantine Because the Plot Needs Her To

Immediately after exposure, Aki bypasses health protocol with a casual flash of clearance. Sid waves her through, promising to "take responsibility."

This is not heroism.

This is reckless, especially in a world supposedly defined by the risk of contamination. You cannot build a setting around the terror of phantom infection and then let your protagonist walk past a bioscan like she’s ignoring airport security.

I don’t need to explain why this breaks the film’s own logic. In a world defined by deadly contamination, this moment feels like someone turning off the smoke alarm because the noise is annoying.

General Hein: A Villain Who Needed a Writer, Not More Lines

The short-lived back-story of General Hein

Hein could’ve been fascinating. A grieving man forced to make impossible decisions. A leader desperate to protect what’s left. Someone crushed by the responsibility of commanding a dying species.

Instead, he’s written like a tantrum in a uniform.

He refuses to wait a little longer for scientific results after three decades of invasion. He weakens the barrier to force political approval to escalate without a strategy. His motivations are mentioned once in a 50-second scene where he talks about his family, killed in an attack inside the San Francisco barrier, and it's never explored beyond that. The character is as two-dimensional as a piece of paper.

The film needed to show us his loss, not just declare it. Hein is the one character who could have grounded the film in raw human grief, but the script never allows him to do so.

Dream‑Sharing: A Shortcut Instead of a Story Choice

Gray appears in Aki’s dream like it’s something that happens all the time. No explanation, rules or even a hint that this is possible.

It feels like the writers needed an emotional beat and didn’t know where else to put it.

Dream logic is fine when the story earns it. Here, it’s just another shrug.

Hein’s Worst Decision: The Film Treats It Like Plot Glue

He weakens the barrier protecting the last of humanity. On purpose. To prove a point.

Then, when phantoms pour in, he doesn't act to reverse the decision.

This isn’t a dilemma or a moral conflict. It’s reckless endangerment written to escalate the plot.

The film wants him to be tragic, but it never gives him the humanity needed to earn that.

That’s inconceivable

Pipes: Apparently, the One Thing Ghosts Shouldn’t Be Able to Handle

Hein actually says:

“No living thing could survive in those pipes!”

He says this after we’ve already watched the phantoms travel through them.

These creatures pass through concrete, engines, armoured vehicles, and people, but pipes? Those should stop them.

Has he been living under a rock for the last 34 years?

It’s unintentionally comedic.

A Romance Inserted Into the Worst Possible Moment

The city has fallen, the shield has collapsed and been destroyed, and people are dead, and Aki and Gray decide this is the perfect moment to have gooey eyes at each other — that slow, mutual, soft-focus stare before they drift off-screen together like they’ve momentarily forgotten the world is/has ended.

This moment feels disconnected from the stakes around them. Romance works in high-pressure narratives, but it needs buildup, conflict, timing. Not an inserted “tender moment” like an emergency software patch while civilisation crumbles.

The chemistry exists; the timing doesn’t.

The Zeus Cannon Is Gorgeous, but Designed by Someone Who Has Never Seen a War

This slot machine isn’t paying out

The Zeus cannon is a masterpiece of visual engineering, featuring rotating plates, glowing rails, and layers of mechanical beauty. Animators clearly had a blast.

But as a weapon? It’s a practicality nightmare. Too many moving parts. Too much mechanical choreography for something built during a desperate war for survival. Weapons developed under extinction-level pressure are usually simple, rugged, and reliable. This thing looks like it was designed by a committee of animators who all wanted their favourite moving part included.

And then there’s Hein. He’s so desperate to fire this thing, so convinced it will solve everything, that he overrides the thermal cutoff. A failsafe designed to prevent a catastrophic meltdown. He stares at a console flashing warnings like a slot machine from hell and still slams his hand on the override because the plot needs him to.

And it kills him.

Not in a poetic way. Not in a tragic way. Not in a “this is the culmination of a complex character arc” way. Just in a “you ignored the big glowing STOP button, and the space gun cooked you for it” way.

It’s one of the clearest examples of the film mistaking escalation for the sake of storytelling.

The Ending: Symbolism Without Support

I know of another fictional person who attacks you in your dreams

The final act wants to be profound, achingly, spiritually profound. Aki and Gray reach the crater, the massive phantom lifeform pulses with energy. Gaia flows under the surface like a river, and while Aki takes a quick nap, the final “spirit” floats into her body, down into the abdomen area, glowing like a small ember of hope. The moment looks beautiful. It’s tender, quiet, almost reverent.

But the film never earns it. The imagery gestures toward themes of creation, rebirth, and healing, yet nothing in the story leading up to this moment builds the philosophical or emotional scaffolding to really support it. The film aims to evoke awe, but it hasn’t provided enough explanation for the awe to take hold.

And let’s be blunt: placing the final spirit near the womb reads like mystical pregnancy symbolism the film never explores, especially after their tender moment with the death of their team in mind. It is supposed to evoke emotion using imagery that the narrative hasn’t actually established.

You shouldn’t need a biology textbook to reconcile the finale. You also shouldn’t need to reverse-engineer the mythology to understand what the final spirit represents.

The ending is gorgeous, but gorgeous in a way that collapses the moment you think about it. Sure, we found a weed growing in the crater and an energy pack left behind — but these are hardly the kinds of discoveries that justify cosmic symbolism or the idea of a spirit settling inside her.

Symbolism only works when the story has taught the audience how to feel about it, and this film never does.

The Gaia Problem: Big Ideas With No Structure

This is where the movie strains the hardest. The script tosses around the concept of Gaia like a philosophical frisbee—sometimes she’s a soul, sometimes she’s an energy field, sometimes she’s harmonic resonance, sometimes she’s an ancient alien echo. The ideas are enormous… but they never settle.

A story can have spiritual elements. It can have scientific metaphors. It can even blend the two. But it has to choose a spine—one central idea that anchors the rest.

The film keeps shifting the goalposts.

Is Gaia literal? Symbolic? Planetary memory? Planetary emotion? Eco‑spiritual consciousness? A misunderstood scientific field? The script treats each interpretation as equally valid and therefore commits to none of them.

Even critic Nell Minow called the film out for this, describing the mythology as:

“...confusing gibberish about the Earth's spirit that does not do justice to the beliefs of environmentalists or pantheists.” (External Source: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/movie-reviews/final-fantasy-the-spirits-within)

She’s right. The film doesn’t need to nail a single belief system, but it does need to understand its own.

And that’s the heart of the problem: the movie spends a lot of time telling rather than showing.

So, How Do You Fix Something This Beautifully Broken?

You don’t need to rewrite the film from scratch—you just need to give it a spine. A few core changes could transform this from a “nearly” film into a genuinely memorable one.

First, start with the threat. Show a soul-rip in minute one. Let the audience feel what humanity is fighting against. Not a dream. An actual person dying in an actual moment.

Second, give Aki’s dreams purpose in the moment they appear. Make them part of the mystery, connected to something she’s actively trying to solve. Let her chase meaning, not drift across it.

Third, fix Hein by grounding him in a loss that we understand. Open with the attack that killed his family. Let the audience feel his wound, so his later actions, even the terrible ones, come from a place we recognise.

Fourth, scar the world. Let the cities show their battle history. Let the survivors speak with the exhaustion of people who’ve lived through decades of fear. Aki says the world is broken—show us the cracks.

Fifth, give us access to the people actually living in this world. Let us hear, even from a distance, their pains—lack of water, food shortages, rolling brown-outs because the barrier has to be reinforced during an attack. A world under siege should sound like it. Civilians don’t need full arcs, but their presence would make the stakes real.

And finally, decide what Gaia actually is. Pick a lane. Spiritual, scientific, alien, metaphorical—anything works as long as the film commits to it. Meaning can only bloom where clarity exists.

Why It’s Almost a Cult Classic

This script is giving me a migraine

David Keith not playing Captain Anderson

There’s a reason Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within refuses to fade from memory, even though it stumbled at the box office. It has that unmistakable “almost” energy—the kind of film that lingers because you can see the brilliance shimmering under the surface, even when the story keeps getting in its own way.

For one, it’s a visual landmark. Even now, decades later, the animation is breathtaking. Every frame feels handcrafted, meticulous, and ambitious in a way that modern CG rarely attempts. People don’t revisit this film for the plot; they revisit it to marvel at what Square Pictures achieved long before the technology was ready.

Then there’s the sincerity. The movie genuinely believes in what it’s trying to say—about life, death, spirits, loss, the soul of a world. Even when the script fumbles, that earnestness resonates. It doesn’t feel cynical or manufactured. It feels like a passion project that reached too far and stretched itself thin in the process.

And most importantly, it’s unforgettable precisely because it almost works. You watch it and think, “One more rewrite. One clearer mythology. One stronger emotional arc. That’s all it needed.” That sense of potential—of what could have been—keeps the film alive in the cultural memory.

It’s beautiful. It’s flawed. It’s haunting. And it lives in that strange cinematic limbo where the failures are as fascinating as the successes.

This is exactly the territory where cult classics are born.

Final Word: A Beauty With No Backbone

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within deserves recognition for its ambition. It pushed the boundaries of digital performance in a way no film had attempted, delivering visuals that remain astonishing even now. Its sincerity is undeniable—every frame is built by artists who believed deeply in what they were making.

But the film’s greatest failing is narrative, not technical. It’s a breathtaking technical milestone wrapped around a story that never quite believes in itself. The movie keeps hinting at ideas about life, death, memory, and the soul, but it refuses to explore them with the clarity they deserve.

With one more rewrite—tighter world‑building, clearer mythology, a story that commits to its own themes, this could have been a landmark in science fiction, not just animation. The pieces were there. The potential was immense. It simply never steps fully into the masterpiece it wants to be.

And that’s why it belongs here: a ghost film reaching out for your heart and soul, perched on the edge of brilliance, which makes it perfect for Almost a Cult Classic: one brave rewrite away from legendary.

Broken worlds, characters carrying more emotional damage than their armour, and people fighting their ghosts — literally and metaphorically. We (husband and wife team) write that too, just with stories that actually commit to the themes. Find our novels at leebreeze.com/books.

End of Year

As the year winds down, this will likely be my last Almost a Cult Classic for 2025. December always sneaks up on me, but this time it’s wrapped in something better — our little girl turns three this week, and the excitement in the house is somewhere between “dance party” and “minor hurricane.” She can’t wait to see her friends, and frankly, watching her joy is far more important than arguing with another deeply flawed sci-fi script.

I’d hoped to have the second Burn the Sky book out by now, but life had other plans. A few unexpected detours, personal curveballs, and suddenly the calendar is looking at me like, “Well? Any progress?” The next trilogy hasn’t had the attention it deserves either, but those worlds aren’t going anywhere. They’ll still be waiting for me when the glitter from the birthday party finally settles.

AaCC has grown far more than I expected this year, and I’m genuinely grateful. Breaking down old genre films has been fun, ridiculous, nostalgic, and occasionally feels like emotional archaeology. But the truth is that each post can take more than a day, and on a tight writing schedule, that’s one of my precious childcare days lost to anything other than writing the actual books I want to release.

So over the festive season, I’ll drop the occasional shorter post to keep the blog alive. Smaller thoughts, maybe the odd rant about 90s CGI or something. However, as we move into the new year, my focus shifts back to the stories that started it all. I owe them — and you — the best version of those worlds I can build.

Here’s to a calmer year, a finished manuscript or three, and enough sleep to remember my own name in the morning.
See you on the other side.