I watched Final Fantasy last nigh. This isn’t a review, since this is about the 5 time I’ve seen it. It’s a great film, it’s far from perfect but it is still a great film.
For a start I think it was the first all CG film that didn’t try to be a cartoon (yes pixar films are great too). They don’t quite get there, it still doesn’t look ‘right’ in most scenes, but it’s close enough that you can forget it’s CG when your in to the film.
I think it’s the cloth simulation that lets it down. The hair is certainly there and maybe the skin doesn’t have the depth it should, but I’m being picky here. Overall the CG is fantastic.
One thing that they do so well in the film is the hardware. Now I’m a hardware man, both in real life (I started with electronics, when in to building PC before moving on to software support and finally software development) and in my sci-fi. I do love the sci-fi hardware. I’ve shelves of technical manuals from various sci-fi films and TV shows (well actually it’s only half a shelf!). And it seems to me that the artists working on the film had a similar love of hardware, you can just tell by the detail they put in to models, the very mean looking marines drop ship, the wonderfully strange looking quatro ATV, the warthog...sorry Bandit ATV. Yes these mostly Japanese love their hardware as much as I do! And the two disc edition of DVD has lots of extra bits about the hardware too!
And then we have the modeling of the characters, yes okay I know she’s not real, but Aki...wow.
Okay, I’m back to normal now.
The film also has some wonderfully beautiful scenes, the opening sequence in the old new york city stands out as just having a wonderful fairy tail like quality. And this might be one of the problems with the film, they have created a work of art, something that is beautiful to look at but which because it’s art they then don’t want to change. I’ve seen something similar happen with another animated film, the anime Patlabor 2. it seemed to me that they had spent so much time creating a thing of great visual beauty that they forgot about the plot, which for most of the film seemed to fade away. Anyway back to main topic.
As I said the film is not perfect. Most of the problems come from the fact that the film tries for an epic feeling which most of the time it doesn’t achieve. Maybe because of the limitations of the rendering it’s difficult to relate to some of the characters which means that some epic-ness is lost. Also the music is way overblown and not very subtle. And by the way this music was used music in the trailer for another great CG film, Sky Captain and the world of tomorrow!
And of course we have to get to the spirits. These are probably the best and most alien, aliens I’ve yet seen on film (implying I’ve seen more alien aliens in real life?!)
Okay, but finally I get on to the main point of this post (it’s taken a while I know!). The central concept of the film, the idea that all living things have a sprit, which returns to the mother sprit at death, presumably for reincarnation. Reincarnation is very actually mentioned in the film, but I get the feeling that at the end of the film, they are hinting that the bird we see at the end (an Eagle?) is grays reincarnated sprit.
Almost all cultures have some system of belief in which death is not the end. It’s not to difficult to understand why this should be, death is pretty big thing to cope with and so when faced with the fact that at some point you just cease to exist (which is what I believe happens at death) mankind has come with stories to comfort him self. After all no one can say what happens after death, but everybody finds out in the end!
Anyway the whole Gaia thing, I certainly don’t believe it as an actual physical (?) entity, but I do see how a planet could be seen as a single living meta entity. That planet, through millions of interactions of living creatures and simple chemical reactions came been seen to react to changes. Look at the current situation with global warming, as temperatures increase we see Antarctic ice melting which will lead to higher sea levels and flood coastal pains which in turn because of the reduced salinity of water could be breading grounds for alge. This increases carbon dioxide consumption and could lower the temperature again. This action can look like a living thing reacting.
And in fact you could look at living bodies as a collection living things (cells) which act on a local scale but have global effects. Each cell, if it where aware of it’s surroundings, would not be able to perceive the whole.
So if you look at it that way then we could just be cells on the Earth totally unaware of the larger consciousness of the Earth as a whole. Even if we where aware of such an entity how could we ever hope to communicate with it.
But like I said I don’t believe in that...I’m willing to be proved wrong however.