Actually the movie was a pile of shit and deserved to lose every cent of the $104 million that it did! We screened it a couple weeks ago in my anime class and people laughed through the majority of it, including both the professors.
The movie has no story. There are multiple scenes where characters say they don't know what's going on. The protagonist Aki even asks the wise old scientist Cid what's going on towards the end of the film (when things should start making sense so there can be some sort of resolution) and he says "I don't know." At another part he says "I can't explain it yet, but I'm sure it will make sense if you go down there" and sends Aki and Gray on a suicide mission that even he doesn't understand.
Horrible horrible plot.
Then, even though Gray has been doubting Aki and Cid throughout the film, at the last second he just says "I believe now" and kills himself. Everybody laughs at that part. Worst character development ever. There is absolutely no reason for him to make that decision, or for him to believe that if he touches the monster and Aki at the same time, he'll save the world. And why does Gray sacrifice himself to save the world? The whole film has been building up to Aki doing that. If that was supposed to be some sort of plot twist, it was pathetic.
They spent most of the money on animating Aki's hair, and it took a lot of money and a lot of time. This is also why every other character in the film is either bald or has very short hair or a hat on. The film was seriously more about hair animation programming than about a story. The entire intro serves no purpose. Why is she floating around in outer space? Oh yeah, so you can get some close-ups of the zero gravity hair animation.
The main problem is that Sakaguchi normally writes stories for video games, in which the main character is a mindless drone with no personality but gets sucked into an adventure, and every other character is a 1-dimensional stereotype. That can work in a video game, where you get to actually become the boring character (think of Crono or Link, who don't even talk but still kick ass because they're YOU). It doesn't work in a movie, which actually needs a story and character development.
And the movie suffered from FF4 syndrome, of every character randomly killing themself to help the star along. Except this time... they all do it at once. Even the villain kills himself. When the protagonist doesn't defeat the antagonist, that's traditionally a plot flaw. It's like a game with no boss battle, or a boss that just blows up when you get there.
