YMMV / Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Here.
• Animation Age Ghetto: An interesting case. It wasn't marketed as a typical animated film, perhaps due to the awareness of this phenomenon, but adult audiences avoided it anyway. Notably, it did not perform any better in Japan, where the Final Fantasy franchise was created and is quite popular.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: At the time, each Final Fantasy title was standalone with (almost) no sequels or spin-offs, so a tie-in was not as guaranteed as it might be later. However, Final Fantasy was still largely experimenting with limited sci-fi elements in otherwise fantasy worlds. A movie that was neither directly tied to any existing game, nor even in the same genre by taking place in Earth's future, had almost nothing in common with the rest of the franchise at the time. Final Fantasy fans had no reason to be invested, and mainstream audiences were turned away by it being connected to a video game in the first place.
  • An adaptation of a popular RPG video game series, that doesn't actually adapt any of the games' stories or characters? Many people suggest that the backlash wouldn't have been as severe if "Final Fantasy" wasn't in the title.
• Broken Base:
  • A lot of fans were annoyed that none of the games were adapted to the big screen before Spirits Within, while others argue that each game is unconnected and it makes sense that the film would be too.
  • Ming-Na Wen's performance. Half of viewers found her flat, dull and lifeless - supposedly so that Aki Ross could be a blank slate. Others find her brilliantly expressive, conveying a lot of subtle emotion.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: The movie treats the reveal that the Phantoms are actually alien ghosts as a big reveal, despite the fact that "phantom" is a synonym for "ghost." Curiously, the initial version of the film (included in special features on home releases) shows that this plot point was treated as common knowledge among the characters in early drafts of the script, too.
• Cliché Storm: It's widely accepted that the story and premise at least are original. However, the characters, particularly Gray (tough marine who rebels against authority), General Hein (Hate Sink of an authority figure) and Neil (Plucky Comic Relief) are hugely clichéd.
• Cult Classic: Is slowly being rediscovered as a forgotten classic that was ahead of its time, just like other teen-oriented animated action films from the early-2000s.
• Dancing Bear: The whole point of the movie was to introduce the possibility for Animated Actors to become a regular thing. Unfortunately, it seems their way of getting this across was to make Aki a total blank slate to ease her being slotted into various roles, with Ming-Na Wen even seeming to have been instructed to play the role as flat as humanly possible, since anyone who's seen a single other role of hers knows she's certainly capable of far more emotion. The result was that the audience was given absolutely no reason to care about seeing Aki ever again, and the idea died in its crib.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Neil due to providing most of the comic relief. Steve Buscemi improvised most of his lines too.
• Fandom Rivalry: With fans of Xenogears, and to a lesser extent, Chrono Cross, since one of the producers at Monolith Soft who was at Square in the late-90s confirmed that a sequel to Xenogears never happened because of the money Square was investing into Spirits Within, thus causing the crew behind that game and Chrono Cross to depart Square and found Monolith Soft, who then went onto create the Xenosaga games out of unused material from the planned installments of Xenogears under Namco, and then were sold to Nintendo in the late-2000s under whom they did the Xenoblade Chronicles series as a Broad Strokes remake of both Xenogears and Xenosaga.
• Friendly Fandoms: With other teen-oriented animated action films from the early-2000s such as Titan A.E., Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Treasure Planet, and Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas. All these films have bombed at the box office yet have earned devoted cult followings among audiences who grew up with these films when they were younger. Also shares this with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, the film often considered to have revived this niche genre that previously never started well financially.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Neil jokes about hoping to have kids, to which Jane responds "that's a spooky thought". Not so funny when Jane physically has to watch him die.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: A giant laser weapon called the Zeus Cannon to deal with hordes of undead creatures is almost tickling considering the name would be re-used for the upgraded form of the Thundergun in Call of Duty: Zombies, where it...basically does the same thing (only wind-powered instead of laser-powered).
• Moral Event Horizon: Hein decides that the best way to convince the Council to use the Zeus Cannon is to let phantoms into the city. Even if the phantoms hadn't spread faster than he expected, his plan was still guaranteed to get people killed.
• Once Original, Now Common: By the standards of mid-2000's moving forward, the animation (especially facial expression) is nothing to write home about, but considering the film came out 3 years before the first movie in performance capture (The Polar Express)... well, at the time it was pretty damn impressive. It certainly scared the hell out of the Screen Actors' Guild when it released, who sent a few representatives out to talk to media outlets about how they didn't support the burgeoning rise of "virtual actors." As CGI technology improved, the film in retrospect, resembles a 100 minute cutscene for an eighth-generation video game.
• Sci-Fi Ghetto: A weird example. The film adaptation of a popular fantasy game series goes for a decidedly grounded Science Fantasy genre. This is possibly because High Fantasy simply wasn't done on the big screen when the film was greenlit (The Lord of the Rings wouldn't get released until six months after this one bombed), as well as the more familiar Western releases in the franchise being more sci-fi than fantasy.
• Spiritual Adaptation: The film is based off a video game and features a futuristic war against aliens with commandos that die in one touch. Should have been adapted as Contra.
• Strawman Has a Point: Hein's this-would-normally-be-true "Oh, so... if I point a gun at the Earth and fire, I'm not just making a hole on the ground, I'm...killing the planet?"
  • Hein is depicted as paranoid for suspecting Aki and Sid might not be on the up and up for sneaking the Phantom-infected Aki into the Barrier City repeatedly, despite that they have no proof their containment system won't suddenly fail, no safeguards in place if it does, and haven't told the guy in charge of security that one of them is a walking bomb that could compromise the city's security at any moment. Seeing this as a possible trojan horse strategy by the Phantoms is actually fairly sensible given the extent to which they both needlessly lied to him and the council about it.
  • Sid also tells Aki to burn any notes related to her support of the Gaia hypothesis because they might be used to discredit them as scientists. The problem being, Sid's objections to Hein's plan being based on a hypothesis he has never attempted to falsify and has next to no evidence for, and Aki's arguments based on intuitive guesses rather than hard facts, are actually pretty good proof neither of them is much of a scientist.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: A variation. Plenty of Final Fantasy fans were annoyed that it wasn't an adaptation of their favourite game and hated it for being a standalone story. Just as well, though, a standalone story that didn't have Final Fantasy staples aside from Dr. Cid. This has been cited as one of several possible factors in the movie's failure.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: Being the first animated film to use photorealistic visuals (and without Motion Capture mind you), it's inevitable the film would fall into the valley. The human characters all look like they're made out of plastic and their overall movements, especially facial expressions, can sometimes be unnatural. Proportions also frequently look strange, with the characters looking like their heads are too big and their shoulders too narrow even when wearing several layers of clothes.
• Uncertain Audience: Suggested here that Square didn't seem to know if they wanted to market the film to a mainstream audience or fans of the games. As a result, it turned off mainstream audiences who brushed it off as another bad video game movie and alienated Final Fantasy fans who viewed it as In Name Only.
• Vindicated by History:
  • Didn't do that well with critics (Roger Ebert loved it, however^note he always loved movies that showed him images he had never seen before) or audiences when it came out. These days it's got a lot more fans, who praise the Scenery Porn and overall story. It's bordering on Cult Classic as the years go by.
  • The "virtual actor" concept seemed pretty pie-in-the-sky, but the idea (a single character model and voice being used to fill many potential roles over different projects) ended up being oddly prescient of machinima, especially Team Fortress 2 SFM projects. With the more recent rise of Virtual Idols and V-Tubers who are essentially animated characters created to be performers, mascots and celebrities, the idea of a "Virtual Actor" doesn't seem that far off from reality.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: While not quite as good as the hype was promising, lots of effort was put into the effects for the film, and some parts are quite impressive. Especially at the time it was made, when even Pixar struggled with animating realistic CGI (granted, Pixar always intended to stick to cartoonish designs, but still).