Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

Its not the release date that counts spdrcr ....its the quality, look and simply all out awesome of a teaser. It's date is different because they planned on releasing it in 2001.

It made sense to me, I just can't explain it right now. I'll think about it. And as for the robot thing. When a general infantry man in the U.S. Marines puts on his or hers armor for battle, they still look like a person don't they? The general shape of their body does not change. So when in the dream, wearing what appears to be armor, they would look the same as when they were phantoms!

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Naw...the phantoms and aliens looked basically identical to me. They should have made it more obvious -- people who have an idea of what's going on, IMO.

Of course they would look identical! It's simply a matter of wearing clothes.

Noooo, armor is far different from clothes. Remember the solider guys from the beginning? You can easily tell the difference betweem them, and their "spirits", which are just shadows of their body.

Yes, but who's to say their armor is different from ours. It could be skin tight but extremely strong! or they could just have shiny skin!

Uh...yeah. You loco.

Am I Chris? Am I?

Hahahahaha. "Am I? Or are you just afraid of the TRUTH?! FACE IT, CHRIS! FOR ONCE IN YOUR LIFE, FACE SOMETHING! YOU'RE JUST LIKE DAD, YOU RUN FROM YOUR PROBLEMS!"

Woah there big fella! I was just joking! lol

Uh...yeah...I was, too. Er...um.

hahaha

I agree with ya on the teaser thing(you think we should make a thread just for the Spider-Man Teaser) it is a very cool teaser, and just the fact that they aren't using it pisses me off. I hope that they include it in the dvd when it comes out. I like it better than the one shown on FF. Other than the fact that you actually see Spidey in that one, that's about all i like about it.

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"I was walking down the street with my friend and he said, "I hear music", as if there is any other way you can take it in. You're not special, that's how I receive it too. I tried to taste it but it did not work." - Mitch Hedberg

oh no, Chris, now you're asking for it again. I'm bout to get on your case again ... ;P

SPOILERS

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"Nothing made sense! Oh yeah, they need 8 spirits to defeat the phantoms. But, uh, why? What is it about these spirits that makes them special? Why are there 8 of them? How do you bring them together when you have all 8? How do you determine which is one of the 8? And how did you come to believe all this earth spirit nonsense?"

1. Earth Spirit: It all begins with Gaia.

I'm trying to remember, but somewhere in those Fantasy games, Gaia is a running theme. It changes, it's not always exact, but it's basically like this theme of "the source" for "spiritual/fantastic" ideas. The film actually didn't get as "magical" as I would have liked, but at least they touched on that.

2. 8 Spirits - random number, probably, but it's a nice, wholesome, infinitely shaped number. Or maybe the creators just felt like picking that one. Maybe 7 was too religious and adding one made them feel better.

3. Why Spirits? - They need 8 biorhythms that basically would recreate the biorhythm of human life/Earth. The alien biorhythm is captured within the invading ghosts; should that biorhythm overpower Earth before the 8 spirits are united, earth is claimed and "negated" by that unstoppable "undead" force (because IT feeds off human spirits and will gobble them all up so there's nothing left).

It's unclear whether the ghosts eat everything (because they left plants and that eagle alone) or just humans. I think the latter; i think the land was just desolate cause the human populace had to flee and was hit by the meteor, and that's why most life couldn't survive, not necessarily cause the enemy spirits swallowed everything up.

I'm leaning toward the idea that the alien force would continue to feed off human life out of a basic hunger for an existence that was forcefully denied it. The ghosts basically want life back - like a chemical reaction. They are made of death and hunger, and want life. They eat human spirits in order to gain that life but obviously, eating human spirits does nothing to end their existence or improve it. Fed with violence and the same rage they feel though, the alien spirit/biorhythm grows huge, as you saw.

4. How to Unite the Spirits - I think of it as a DNA strand. As I mentioned, a biorhythm. A melody can have several strains, parts, and exist as a whole. Supposedly their invention could find the rhythm of "life", a strand of human *spiritual* (rather than physical) DNA, or if not human, Earth's. All 8 had to be spread across the world to find a good "sampling." Those found in the outside world put together will equal the one found within earth (Gaia).

5. Story - these guys didn't actually intend to encounter Gaia in the end and were hoping to have the biorhythm on their own, a taste of it to "cure" Aki of the alien virus (hungering invasive spirit). then they could use that cure to figure out how to defeat it. because of last minute changes and the villain getting in their way it came down to actually using Aki and a human conduit/sacrifice to "vaccinate" the virus that was infecting earth and which had actually, because of the accident, completely infected/overtaken Gaia (earth's spirit).

tada!!

Ta-da? No offense, but I don't buy most of that. Anyone at all can see that this movie asks you to fill in a whole buttload of gaps yourself. How many people do you think came to the same conclusion as you?

But why? Why does reuniting/recreating the "biorythems" of the "earth's spirit" negate these aliens?


They had to be spread across the world for a good sampling? Wha? Anyway, who is it who spread them across the world, and how can they identify them when they've found one?

Furthermore, how on earth did they figure this out? All we know is that some way or another they discovered all this crap about Gaia, even though they really don't know if it exists. Obviously in that world it is not considered to be popular opinion that Gaia exists...so what is it that has them believing in it?

Anyway, I don't think I really need to tell you that I don't buy this earth's spirit stuff, but I would have tolerated the funky political message if the movie had made any real sense.

speaking from the perspective of someone who was pretty lost most of the way through the movie, i'm gonna have to agree with commish on this one. keep in mind, i loved the movie, and want to see it again, but you have to admit, even if you did figure it out, it's still complicated because the script is so full of gibberish and gobbeldygook that it's damn near incomprehensible. the plot was excellent, but TOO MANY DETAILS. i hate it when they have a workable, strong idea and then junk it up. oh, well.... still a good movie, still worth your time if you haven't seen it yet.

Hey I agree completely with Thmillin, I'm just not as good as formulating my thoughts as she is!

SPOILERS

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well, i do agree they didn't develop background properly, but i still got everything from watching the movie. i think they wanted to keep it all "mystery" (to develop the tension at the beginning when we don't know what Aki is up to and then she has her big "show" in front of the Committee). they were manipulating us in terms of her boyfriend (whatever his name is) and playing with our sympathy, which can work, but didn't here.

in holding back at first, they'd have to do it later, and if they divulged a mini Discovery Channel section about what Gaia means and how it works and specifically how they found out, etc, it would have interrupted the flow of the film and taken more time. To that degree, they simplified so much and misplaced/cut out valuable information that leaves viewers like you skeptical/confused and demanding more explanation.

have you ever played FF? cause i'm like, if you can't buy the Earth Spirit/Gaia, how did you ever buy the magic and "sourcing" in the games?

"But why? Why does reuniting/recreating the "biorythems" of the "earth's spirit" negate these aliens? "

the aliens are phantoms. the phantoms are "spirits", aka, a biorhythm. it exists in terms of sound (uncertain - may be light) frequencies. if that frequency encounters the frequency of the human body (it's spirit), it absorbs it, "eats" it, overpowers it. In a sense, they make the human frequency a part of their own, thus the infection. Like becoming a cancer.

Humans don't have Gaia in them - they are just humans with human spirits. Gaia is the spirit of *earth*, and the phantoms are the spirit of whatever planet they came from, which is pissed and angry and hungry for life. It was necessary to use Gaia to counteract the "viral infection" of the phantoms. As you saw in the film, the military fired the laser beam that destroyed Gaia, but a taste was left within Aki, which was all that was needed to counteract the big red blob and make it all a pretty blue. My assumption would be that a "live" earth spirit of the same caliber of the phantoms could conquer them, where as a human spirit alone is just absorbed. where evil phantom spirits infiltrate human spirits, the Gaia spirit "infiltrated" the phantom spirits.

"They had to be spread across the world for a good sampling? Wha? Anyway, who is it who spread them across the world, and how can they identify them when they've found one? "

me being ironic; no one "spread them" - I was referring to the movie creators (like a treasure hunt, ups the ante in the film).

the spirits could exist randomly, anywhere, at any time. thus the random places they were in. it's just that the matching strand of frequency is rare - therefore, you're less likely to find it a block away from you and more likely to find it halfway across the world, as Aki explained.

"and how can they identify them when they've found one? "

It doesn't work that way - you know what the frequency is and you scan for it. That's what they were always doing! This is where they skipped - because somehow the doctor knows the whole frequency of Gaia without ever having encountered it. The implication is that he used the alien phantoms in experiments to find it and a line somewhere in the film suggests that the humans were not so far in their own make-up from the aliens, which is an idea that helped them make advances in their research, but also ticked the committee people off. So, they get their hands on the whole frequency, and they break it down - into 8. Then they match the 8, one at a time. the film spent a lot of time doing and saying this, so why this part is not acceptable to you, Chris, I don't know ...

"Obviously in that world it is not considered to be popular opinion that Gaia exists...so what is it that has them believing in it? "

Once again, I agree they didn't develop this theme. The implication is that when the doctor was young and researching the history of humans, he came across this information. whether he was looking for it, came across it, who knows. but it seemed like it was an "old" discarded belief (or still held but by few who were more than likely not open about it), for several times in the movie it was referred to as poppycock, but I don't think the doc made it up, I think it was information on it that he found and then used and they didn't like him using archaic "ballyhoo" to save the world when it seemed like force would do the trick. It also seems unlikely Aki would just assist him without knowing/understanding what she was looking for, nor participate in experiments in the first place, let alone on herself, without having seen some evidence first.

Yeah, I've played some FF. Most of all, though, I watched my brother play. FF7 totally sucked me in. I was hooked, and that's just by watching it! Only the second RPG I was ever involved in. Great game...didn't like FF8 nearly as much. The difference for me is that the game can be fun anyway, but how enjoyable the movie is is directly dependent on things like the storyline. IE: PacMan makes no dang sense, but it's still fun.

See, it's another thing that just comes out of nowhere: a human spirit "eats" a phantom spirit...but I don't remember them saying that in the film. They left way too many gaps for people to jump over. I mean, heck, are we even sure that's what's going on? If they didn't say so, this is all conjecture, isn't it?


I'm confused...wouldn't the phantoms be their own spirits, like we are?


Well, the thing I have a problem with is that I don't know that this stuff was implicated at all. I mean, I'm not a dumb person, and I had no clue that this was suggested, or that was suggested. How hard can it be to write a script that explains these things, or reworks them so they can be explained smoothly?

The only thing the film spent a lot of time saying was "we need to find 8" -- never why, how they found that number, or how they came to the conclusion that it would fix all their problems either. Just "we need to find 8."

I think the story of this movie was standard sci-fi spaceman crap. It's just a clothesline for the visuals. I don't know what the hell was going on, and to be quite honest, I don't care. The whole point of the movie is to gaze up at it, full of wonder and excitement that those people aren't real, that an entire universe has been created before our very eyes. It's my theory that the movie could have been played on mute and you'd still get the same thing out of it. Visually, it's one of the best experiences I've ever had. The story was stupid. I didn't care about what happened, but I was too filled with wonder to dislike the movie. A universe, free of traditional-looking animation but still obviously unreal, has been unleashed with this film. Now, anything is possible. Absolutely anything. I don't care about the story, and everyone who's arguing over it is going after a lost cause. I wouldn't have cared if there wasn't one at all.

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