Coverage:

Don’t be surprised as you’re walking out of "Final Fantasy," if you’re scratching your head trying to figure out what the heck you’ve just seen. Sure "Final Fantasy," the computer animated sci-fi flick based on the popular video game, looks great. The filmmakers have painstakingly created astounding and ground breaking computer generated images right down to the nose hairs and facial expressions. But it’s less filling, because the plot is so convoluted. The audience isn’t sure whether the pimple-faced kid who’s running the projector was showing the reels out of order, or maybe they just weren’t paying attention to the storyline. Fact is, the vague plot would probably make more sense if the reels were shown out of order and the voices were redubbed in Appalachian pig Latin. In comparison, the script from "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider," another Sony PlayStation videogame turned confusing big screen adventure, begins to read like Shakespeare. The film opens in post-apocalyptic New York City with the remnants of mankind living in a transparent dome fighting alien ghosts. The film’s heroine, Dr. Aki Ross (voice of Ming-na Wen) who’s dying from a fatal disease, is searching her dreams for the answer to the alien invasion. Accompanied by a elite squadron of soldiers led by Capt. Gray Edwards (voice of Alec Baldwin) and Sgt. Ryan Whittaker (voice of Ving Rhames), Ross begins to search the Earth to collect eight spirit waves she believes will save the world. However, Ross and the squadron are in a race against the evil General Hein (voice of James Woods) who's planning to fire a super weapon called the Zeus Cannon into the Earth’s core, which will kill the aliens and destroy Earth’s living spirit in the process. Ross discovers that her dreams symbolize the war which destroyed the alien’s world with a horrific explosion that sent the invaders spiraling to Earth on a meteor 34 years earlier. She learns the eighth spirit she’s searching for is living inside the meteor’s crater and she has to enter the alien’s lair to retrieve it. If "Final Fantasy" proves anything, it underlines the fact that cyber-actors can be just as boring as their human counterparts in a poorly constructed plot. It also proves that cyber-animation is realistic enough to carry a movie, and can be a medium for future filmmakers to bring back beloved aging actors. But given its poor plot, "Final Fantasy" just doesn’t live up to its expectations.