Baldwin is a strong voice and suits his character well. Ming-Na hardly has that distinctive a voice and she is rather bland at times but she does OK. The voice cast are pretty good and they do well to add a bit of a human touch to characters that, for all the money spent on them, still look and movie like computer game characters in an expensive cut-scene between levels. Suffice to say though, that this is an animated movie rather than the movie that triggers the onslaught of computer generated characters in films. Admittedly it matters less here because we can get used to the characters looking like effects (unlike, say, Matrix 2 where we are not meant to notice the difference between real and effect). CGI has yet to manage to make characters that look and move as naturally as humans we have seen it in Matrix Reloaded, Blade 2 and also here. The only things that don't work (ironically enough considering the film's boasts) are the human characters. Of course these look great for the most part and the film has delivered a visually impressive series of spaceships, desolate cityscapes and blobby aliens. I still enjoyed it to a certain degree but it is evident from the film that the script writing and plotting took a backseat to the development of the computer graphics. As a sci-fi film it works reasonably well but is not as intelligent as it clearly needed to be to support the story if it had only aspired to be a good guys/bad guys story then fine but it wanted more and it isn't well enough developed to do it. I would have quite liked a greater understanding of the story, the characters and the aliens but it did enough to support the film's plot as was. Anyway, let me just say that I have no knowledge of the games, never played the games and will likely never play the games but I had no problem picking up the rough story (even though I'm sure the wider FF universe has so much more story in it that this film does). Another thing that put me off was that most people just assumed it was a kid's film because it was animated and was quickly dumped in matinee slots even when I saw it on TV it was in the slot on Sunday afternoon used for mostly kiddie fare. Sadly this seemed to be all the discussion about the film amounted to and I think it put people off that nobody talked about the plot or whether it was any good or not I know it put me off from bothering to go and see it. This film got a lot of publicity about the fact that it was billed as the film that would trigger a whole new type of movie those with no human stars (well, apart from their voices). Ross joins the elite military unit Deep Eyes to finish her quest, but General Hein is determined to convince the ruling council that the best solution is the use of a weapon that will destroy the aliens despite Sid's protests that it could destroy the Earth in the process. Under the tutelage of Dr Sid, young Dr Aki Ross is searching for spirits that can combine to counteract the life force of the aliens a situation made even more urgent by the fact that she is infected by the aliens herself and experiencing strange dreams as a result. It is the year 2065 and Earth has been invaded by a race of phantom-like aliens that kill with a single touch.
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