I spent another afternoon catching up on my movie watching. (Read: I paid for one matinee ticket and hopped a little bit.) I saw “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” and “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence”. Thus I spent $6 to get in (can you believe a matinee is $6 now?), making $3 per movie, and I feel ripped off.

First, let me dissect “Final Fantasy”. I’m reading the same thing from every profession movie reviewer: What the movie accomplished in CG it lacked in script. Some critics are more generous then others, giving FF a 4 out of 5, while others, like me, are more honest and crack the movie hard. Some parts were laughably stüpid, like when Aki make the revelation that the Phantoms are Ghosts! Other parts are painfully stüpid, like when General Hein makes a calculated error that costs millions of lives. But mostly it was just pathetically stüpid.

I haven’t been exposed to that much left wing, touchy feely, the Earth is alive, environmentalist wacko, brainless, drooling, ideological garbage since… damn, I don’t know when. Even college wasn’t this bad. At least in a classroom environment you can argue with the teacher and get some feedback. Yelling at the silver screen isn’t nearly as satisfying.

Let me give the movie it’s justice - it is beautiful. Very nicely painted. And a couple of times it did look like the animators had really taken their time to define the movement of the characters very well. Other times it looked like they had over done it (I’ve never seen hair wave so much indoors before). It also looked like more time was taken with some characters then others. I read that the animators spent 80% of their time on the Aki character, and most of that just on her hair.

Well, I wish they’d spent just a little of that time writing a script that wasn’t so childish! The plots on some of the FF games are extremely complicated and require real attention to follow or you’ll never beat the game. In contrast, this movie was formula Hollywood crap. Where is the great Japanese movie making tradition? This is obviously not the same linage as Akira Kurosawa, Katsuhiro Ôtomo, Mamoru Oshii, and Ishirô Honda.
Damn you, Hironobu Sakaguchi, for betraying your ancestors with your terrible story telling, and damn you for wasting my time.

Now it’s time for me to tear up Steven Spielberg and A.I.

This film, far more then Final Fantasy, did I have high expectations for. I love Kubrick’s work, and I love Spielberg’s films (I even liked “Hook” a little, and “1941″ isn’t near as bad as everyone thinks it was), so I really expected this movie to be awesome.

And I’ll tell you, the first half of it was. Then it got boring. Then the tragedy really hit: it got stüpid. It was as if Steven kept writing, in a caffeine and amphetamine induced high, and he kept coming to points where he could end the story, but no! We have to keep going! “What’s the zaniest thing that can happen now?” he wonder to himself. And this bizarre plot twist takes us of on a longer ride, and just when you this it will end as a tragedy, it keeps going! And just when you think it ends as a good movie that went bad at the end, it keeps going! And just when you think it’s going to end as a good movie that ends as an incredibly stüpid movie (even though those good parts are now hours behind you and those lavish and beautiful scenes are fading from memory because of the abject stupidity that faces you now), it keeps going! And just when you think to yourself “this can’t be the end”, it ends!

The whole thing seemed like Steven was trying to imitate Stanley’s style, but not like an homage, more like a parody. At one point Jude Law dances like Malcolm McDowell (and I swear if he had sung “Singing in the Rain” I would have marched out of that theater and demanded the money back I didn’t spend to see it). Many of the big panoramas felt like “2001″. The big finally was very “2001″, only not as good.

And so I left the theater, confused and hurting about the rectum. I had wasted over 5 hours of my life watching movies I now hated. I thought about Final Fantasy, and I wondered why they spent all that time creating lifelike 3D models and rendering these complex scenes when the script they were working with sucked chocolate salty balls. I thought about A.I., and I wondered how such a simple message could get buried under so much garbage.

So here’s the lesson as I see it.

1) You can be backed by a very successful, well established franchise, have all the cutting edge computer power you need, hundreds of talented animators, and really good voice talent, but without a descent script your movie will still suck.
2) You can be the greatest living director, have a project handed to you as the dying wish of the formerly greatest living director, have all the money in the world, capable actors, and without a descent script your movie will still suck.

The two gleaming bright spots: I got to see both trailers for “Lord of the Rings” and a trailer for “Spiderman” that blew my mind and got an ovation from the crowd. I am confident “Lord of the Rings” has a good plot, and even of “Spiderman” is a silent movie it will be better than Final Fantasy.