I skipped out of the lab early today to see Final Fantasy with Nisha. The first 10 minutes left me squirming in my seat, thinking, Oh no, this is going to be one long video game.. Despite those moments of discomfort, the movie actually turned out to have a half-decent plot, and for the most part the graphics were fantastic.
Which brings me to my criticism. Nisha gave me A Bug's Life on DVD today, and I must remark that despite the much simpler shading models and facial expressions, ABL blows the socks off FF in terms of naturally expressing motion and expression. It's as if FF spent so much money developing their models, they had none left to use them to their fullest. Beyond that, the lip-synching was unbelievably abysmal in comparison to ABL.
All that being said, I quite enjoyed the movie, unlike Katz, who completely trashed it. What really got me going, though, was the LOTR trailer.