Personally, I Was Fantasizing About the End of the Movie

So, I just finished watching Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which a co-worker of mine who just bought a DVD player lent me, in exchange for me lending him the director's edition of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Boy, did he get the better part of that exchange. Frankly, Final Fantasy makes ST:TMP look like Citizen Kane, and you know that's saying something. Yes, it's an extraordinary technological accomplishment, but unfortunately, it's also a really, really bad movie. And not even amusingly bad like, say, Event Horizon. Just bad. The thing is, after about fifteen minutes or so, you finally get tired of oohing and aahing over how natural the shadows and the movements and the skin textures look, and then you realize that there is absolutely nothing else about the movie that makes it worth your time. The premise is nonsensical, the plot is dull, the dialog is trite, and no amount of CGI wizardry is ever going to succeed in making the characters three-dimensional. Plus, I was rooting for the bad guy, because in any remotely rational universe, he would have been right.

Honestly, the only thing that kept me from turning it off in the middle was the fact that when the guy who lent it to me asks if I watched the thing, I don't want to have to admit that I couldn't make it through. Don't ask me what happened in the last half-hour or so, though, because I suddenly developed a series of irresistable impulses to get up and use the bathroom, or see what was in the fridge, or straighten up the DVDs on the shelf, or basically do pretty much anything that didn't actually involve paying attention to the movie.

It's a damned shame, really. I'd love to see that level of technology applied to a good movie. Or even to a not-actively-sucky movie. In the meantime, I'm filled with a strong desire to watch Toy Story again. Sure, it may be more cartoony and less realistic than Final Fantsy, but it's about six hundred thousand times more watchable. At the very least.