It’s a pretty well known stereotype in the North American movie world – perhaps globally – that movies based on the stories told in video games generally aren’t that great. Of course, that’s a somewhat mixed opinion with the people who actually make them because, in spite of this, a great number of those movies turn a pretty nice profit, some of them even hitting blockbuster status. Among those that were panned critically, though, is a diamond in the rough that was often seen as a great standalone movie that suffered against a franchise name that was well-known for being incredibly high quality and was riding a huge wave of success and expectation at the time. The pressure of expectation was a big one and for a brand new studio created by a company that hadn’t ever made a feature-length film in the past – we have to remember their contributions to the Animatrix series of shorts and the various CGI work they’d done for other movies before The Spirits Within – and with that hype train riding faster and faster towards release, the movie was almost doomed to be panned, from the time that train got on the tracks… follow the jump for more!

Read More