As much as this movie has already been punished I'm going to bring it out anyways.

I'm not a big Final Fantasy fan...infact I've only played one game: Seven, and I only played the demo version, and I didn't even know what I was doing half the time in that game. If you don't know already, this movie was a box office bomb, which means...it lost a huge amount of money, 130 Million dollars about, nearly bankrupting everyone involved...You ever wonder why the Playstation 3 was $600 dollars? This probably is why. While apparently Sony and Square Enix are not bankrupt today, seeing as how they're making so many games like Final Fantasy 10 and Kingdom Hearts and not losing hardly anything because they're able to make more...Final Fantasy Spirits Within's domestic box office loss was, at the time, the largest in film history.

So you may be asking "Why was it such a failure?" Well for one thing there were 9 games at the time...and the film wasn't based off any of them...Infact you could have given this movie a different title like "Survivng Earth Number 2"or "Attack of the Immortal Phantoms" and you wouldn't have known it was suppose to be in the Final Fantasy family...and your saying right now there were little things that were related to it...Dr. Cid is refferenced to Sid but I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about overall...you wouldn't know it.

I may have gone over this in the TMNT 4 review and I probably will in future reviews but when making a movie like this.......you cannot just slap anything you want together, put a famous name on it and automatically assume it will make money...However Sony and Square didn't know that at the time because it had never happened before...This movie was pretty much a learning experience for them.....And others learned from it as well, such as Microsoft and Nintendo...but not Sega...Sega somehow doesn't get that putting Sonic in a video game will not make it good automatically...Even today. Nintendo's leason was learned with the Phillips CD-I...and if you ever mention it to Nintendo you'll disappear a few days later.

I know I haven't even gone over the movie itself yet, and I don't intend to...I've seen the movie but I hardly remember what it was about...Something about alien phantoms that took over earth and a research team fights them off and they all mostly die.

My really huge main gripe with this movie is what it did to all gaming companies...It scared the life out of them.

After this movie came out: Nintendo, Sega, Microsoft, and mostly Sony came to the realization that they can lose money by making a movie based off a video game....And that sucks. Now there are much fewer movies based on video games and this movie is probably one of the reasons that a Zelda movie doesn't exist...I'm serious, or a Kirby movie, Metroid Movie, Star Fox movie, ect.

.........And that's why I hate this movie.

This movie should teach other game to movie-movies a lesson: Make the plot based on the game...not something completely random...And you know what the next Final Fantasy Movie got it right because it had to do with a game, their most famous game...and it was a success...And I personally like that movie.

If it weren't for this movie we would probably have more video game movies...I guess a failure was inevitable...but still if not for this movie there could have been potential for other movies to come out like Halo or Half-Life so we would stop whining.

So what else can I say about this movie? Well...I don't know, it's been slammed and destroyed by all critics, it took a chance by trying to be the first movie to seriously attempt photorealistic CGI humans. That sounds cool, but it obviously didn't save it from what happened. The story was kinda...ok...But if your a Final Fantasy fan it's probably disapointing, I mean the games are about magic spells, swords, memorable villains, a good plot, and an enjoyable experience...But here there are no swords, and no magic. Instead there's just guns and immortal phantoms, and a villain that nearly commits suicide at the end of the movie.

..............Well that doesn't sound like Final Fantasy does it fans?

Bottom line: this movie has nothing to do with the games, which is why it failed.