Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) on Netflix
PG-1320011h 46mActionAdventureAnimation
In 2065, Earth is overrun by Phantoms, alien life forms that consume the Gaia spirit of anyone they touch. Scientist Aki Ross hunts for eight spirits whose combined energy could stop them.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb6.4/1086,751 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes44%
Trailer
Plot summary
In 2065, alien life forms called Phantoms infest Earth. Their touch consumes the Gaia spirit of a living being, and even brief contact can leave an infection behind. The surviving humans shelter behind energy shields in barrier cities. Infected during an experiment, scientist Dr. Aki Ross and her mentor Dr. Sid believe that eight spirits, energy patterns carried by different lifeforms, can be joined into a wave able to negate the Phantoms. Aki's hunt for the sixth of them takes her into the ruins of New York City, where Captain Gray Edwards and his Deep Eyes squad free her from an attack. Before the leadership council, she and General Douglas Hein clash over his Zeus cannon, which Dr. Sid warns could damage Earth's own Gaia.
Cast
Show all 20 cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The merger between Square and Enix was delayed by the film's failure and by Enix's hesitation at merging with a company that had just lost a substantial amount of money. Square Pictures was closed in late January 2002, largely because of the film's commercial failure.
- The film was the first photorealistic computer-animated feature film ever made, and the most expensive film inspired by a video game until the release of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time in 2010.
- The film's 141,964 frames each took an average of 90 minutes to render, and by the time production wrapped, Square had amassed 15 terabytes of artwork for a single movie.
- Aki appeared dressed in a bikini on the cover of Maxim and was ranked by the magazine and its readers as one of the sexiest women of 2001, placing at No. 87 out of 100 and becoming the first fictional woman ever to make the list.
- Sakaguchi named the main character Aki after his mother, who died in an accident several years before production. Her death led him to reflect on what happened to the spirit after death, and those thoughts resurfaced as he planned the film, taking the form of its Gaia hypothesis.
- The final cost of $137 million, which included about $30 million spent on marketing by Columbia Pictures, escalated from an original budget rumored to be around $70 million. Of that, $45 million alone was spent on the construction of Square's studio in Hawaii.
- In 2011 BioWare art director Derek Watts cited The Spirits Within as a major influence on the Mass Effect series, and in the 2015 game Life Is Strange the lead character says of it, "that's one of the best sci-fi films ever made".
