Final Fantasy Movie...um...huh?

Cafe Society
1

Okay, the hubby and I watched this last night, and by the end, we were both staring at the screen scratching our heads. Both of us at separate points said, “I have no idea what the hell is going on.”

Neither of us have any familiarity with the game. Perhaps that’s part of it.

So…can someone please explain:

  1. The 8 spirit-things?

  2. How the hell can ghosts from alien realm kill people? And what were they doing? Stealing people’s spirits?

  3. The Gaia thing–so…what was the deal at the end? Was that the alien Gaia or Earth Gaia, or are they one and the same…? How did they make Gaia happy?

  4. The last dream Ako or Aki or whatever her name is didn’t quite make sense to me, except to say the 8th spirit was in her. So–Gaia wanted to find the 8th spirit?? Why?

  5. If these are ghosts, how can one be “infected” with them? Why have a phantom thingy inside you? How does that benefit the undead alien?

  6. Alec Baldwin’s captain character at the end died, right? So that was his corpse she was cradling on the trip back, yes?

I’ll just start with those six. It really was a fascinating movie, but it was a little too convoluted for our tastes. Perhaps we should have played the game first.

2

The only relationship between the movie and the game is that they both share the same title. That’s really about it.

I can’t help you with anything else. It was a really bad movie, IMHO.

3

A clarification to what ultrafilter said – the plot of the movie is completely different from the games, but the ideas about nature, life, and death are similar to two of the games – FF7 and FF9.

Start with the idea of the Lifestream from Final Fantasy 7 – a sort of idea of reincarnation in which rather than one soul transferred from life to life, all souls of all living things return to a common pool at the moment of death, and new souls are created from that common pool.

The Lifestream – the place between lifetimes – is a sort of paradise, in which souls are one, until parts of that one split off to give life to plants and animals. The lifestream is depicted as a sort of liquid-blue energy in FF7, and the lifestreams of different worlds in FF9 are shown as blue and red.

Also add the idea that an entire planet is a living organism, of which life on the planet are the cells.

They are “waves.”

Think of Gaia and the original world the phantoms inhabited as two incompatible computer systems. The two life forces were incompatible. The scientists were trying to make them compatible.

They cannot construct or alter these energies from scratch. They must find them. They are trying to construct a series of patterns that will neutralize the phantom life force by converting them into a format that can be absorbed by earth’s Lifestream.

Essentially. They were trying, and failing, to join the lifeforce of our world, the process of life and death, by blindly reaching out and grabbing at the nearest source of life – whether human or animal. Because the “programs were incompatible,” the “data” was corrupted – the souls/lifeforce of these people destroyed

The alien Gaia was converted to a format usuable by our Gaia. Both were made happy because the alien Gaia was no longer flailing stupidly around looking for a chance to be reborn, and the earth Gaia is happy that it is no longer being torn to shreds by the phantoms.

They are now one and the same. The souls of all alien lifeform – plant, animal, and humanoid – will now be born on earth as earth creatures. The memories and experiences of that world may continue to appear in dreams, etc.

Gaia wanted to find the 8th spirit because if it didn’t, the alien Gaia would kill it while trying to join with it. Not sure what it meant about the 8th spirit being within her.

Somehow it got inside her, trying to fuse with her – in the process it would inadvertantly take her soul/lifeforce. They contained it. It doesn’t want to kill her, but being an undead soul, it’s not really all that smart. Stimulus-response. It sees lifeforce, it moves towards it.

Yes. He is dead but his soul is not destroyed. It’s rejoined the common pool, and his sacrifice means that earth won’t become the next dead planet. He will be reborn as something else, or perhaps several something elses. The two worlds have become one.

4

Wow.

What a bizarre movie.

5

Wasn’t it though :smiley:

I can’t imagine trying to make sense of that movie if I hadn’t seen the Lifestream movie sequence in FF7, or heard Garland’s lectures on the movement of souls from FF9. IMHO, it was too much to hit non-fans with, all at once.

The later Final Fantasy games have themes around animism, often in direct opposition to more Christian elements. They usually tie together modern ecological themes with concepts from Japan’s traditional Shinto religion – especially the concept of kami. Anyone unfamiliar with these ideas would be lost.

6

Apparently, Hamish. When Aki (?) said “Those aren’t aliens attacking us. They’re ghosts,” I burst out laughing. If it had been better set up, or better explained, it wouldn’t have sounded as ridiculous as it did (at least to me).

The film was fascinating but needed Cliff Notes to accompany it.

7

As I recall, the themes presented in the movie and FF7/FF9 are actually pretty prevalent in Japanese popular culture. So it’s not so much that the movie was aimed at fans of the games, but that it was aimed at the Japanese.

8

Good point. I have seen similar concepts in quite a bit of animé.

9

As Dr. Sid said, the 8th spirit (Type of spirit?) seems to have been created when a new spirit leaving the Earth Gaia joined with a spirit from the Alien Gaia. The first “8th spirit” they detected in the crater was destroyed by the Zeus cannon. And the second “8th spirit” was in Aki. How, you ask?

My take:

  1. Aki already has an Alien spirit within her.

  2. Before leaving for the crater, Aki and Gray were having a very…“tender” moment on board the ship in Earth orbit. Then the scene fades out.

  3. New Earth Gaia spirits leave Gaia proper to become the “life force/soul” of new life forms.

  4. (Hint, Hint)

Lending credence to this theory, according to the IMDB, a scene was supposedly cut from near the finale, in which Aki tells Gray that she doesn’t want him to sacrifice himself, because she’s pregnant with their child.

Ranchoth
(How’s that?)

10

In other words, the eighth spirit is Aki’s newly-conceived child? I could buy it.

But that’s some timing – saved at the last minute from certain annihilation by conception of a child.

deus ex uterus

As for the cut scene – they left it out because they thought it was too Hollywood. It would have made sense for the movie to be planned around it, though. They might not have expected it to be cut until the last minute, by which time it would’ve been impossible to go back and change things.

11

Is that what was going on? I had thought that:

a) Earth scientists needed a special ray (or radiation, or something) to make the different types of spirits compatible.
b) This ray had a specific wavelength. This wavelength was found by combining the life forces (souls) of a specific bunch of organisms.
c) Aki had a scanner that let her find said organisms. She had already collected the majority of them before the movie began. (I had felt that they started the movie halfway through the game they would have made out of it.)
d) The other life forces were: in the flower in the wrecked city, in the armor of the corpse in the crater, and in Aki herself (or was destined to appear in the spirit of Aki’s unborn child? I hadn’t heard of that scene until now. Being in the child would explain why she didn’t find it in herself when she first started searching.).

Of course, it’s been a while since I saw the movie. I’ll admit to being wrong.

On a slight hijack, I was interested in the idea of making a suit of power armor that ran off someone’s soul.

12

Actually, you’re mostly right. The energy of the “ray” though was that previously-undiscovered soul-energy of Dr. Sid’s that they now used to power their anti-phantom weapons and shields. They were trying to reach the right wavelength by combining energies they found in certain organisms. And yes, Aki had collected the previous ones before the movie had started.

As for the suit of armour, it didn’t so much run off with someone’s soul (or souls) as was given one. They needed that lifeforce-energy to fight the phantoms, and the right wavelength had just hapened to appear in a battery pack.

But it is a disturbing concept anyway – the idea of souls as a power source.