Overall: 7-8
Personal Subjective Score: 9

Perhaps the greatest lost opportunity in the past half-century of filmmaking. A critical miscalculation in marketing and a failure of imagination by the public squandered what could have been a revolution in the capacity of fantastic filmmaking.

Final Fantasy fans complained, rather hypocritically, that it had nothing to do with the games when the games were connected by themes, not setting or characters. The critics weren't willing to take it seriously because it was "animation", and half of their jobs are posturing for their peers. And the public... just didn't go to see it. I personally don't get the last fact. The sheer beauty and originality of what was shown in the trailers before the film's release, alone, _should_ have made it a media phenomenon... but it didn't, and that makes me legitimately sad.

And here we are today, 20 films deep into mind-numbingly banal, jokey-joke, Americans in America + a little space Marvel films and actors in *ridiculous caked on "alien" makeup*, and I think of what could have been, and that this film... this gentle, beautiful fantasy parable in the shape of a sci-fi action drama was a box office failure that ended up being the actual Final Fantasy of the talented and inspired staff of Square Pictures.

We * need* more films from this studio.

It was fitting that this film was released in the first year of the new decade, (and century, and millennium), as it was a culmination of the imagination of science fiction and fantasy films of the 1980s and 1990s, and a maturation and apotheosis of the themes they followed, along with a revisitation of the lost theme of environmental culpability and responsibility, rendered with the state of the art of computer animation, and had the boldness, integrity, and intelligence to play it for real, instead of with some perversely colorful, happy meal, kiddie lowest-common-denominator "family" toy movie, but to make a legitimate adult drama, and to even have a serene, positive message.

Failing stories like this film tells, not appreciating the transcendent personality of its protagonist and not understanding the film's transcendent theme, and going on to create the reality that we have _instead_ is damning evidence that humanity will never learn. The stupid, the pathologically optimistic, the majority, and its sycophant class of rulers will destroy this planet with mindless and careless greed as everything of our culture degenerates as we slowly die out on a radioactive, plastic, and smog-filled planet.

We either had to achieve the sublime or fail to save ourselves from our self-made apocalypse. We have failed.