HOLLYWOOD’S freshest new face is a giant fake. Nothing about her is real – not her bobbed black hair, her pixie nose, flawless complexion or knock-out bod.
She was born in a computer, but Dr. Aki Ross is poised for real-life stardom as the virtual heroine of “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within,” Columbia’s $100 million new sci-fi epic.
The brainy bombshell has already graced the cover of Maxim’s Hottest 100 supplement (in a string bikini!) and women’s magazines are clamoring for her beauty tips.
Aki, a futuristic researcher who leads a team of planetary defenders trying to rid Earth of serpent-like aliens in the year 2065, is a virtual cross between the butt-kicking Sigourney Weaver of “Alien,” the serious-minded Gillian Anderson of “The X-Files” and a subtly sexy Winona Ryder.
As the photo-realistic new face of the so-called “syn-thespians” – synthetic actors created with state-of-the-art computer technology – Aki is taking the concept of a credible human replicant to a new level.
“To be honest, we didn’t imagine that she’d be on the cover of Maxim,” says “Final Fantasy” producer Chris Lee, who showed footage from the trailblazing film in New York this week.
“She’s going to be in other magazines as well – we’ve had lots of questions from women’s magazines like, ‘Did you bring in someone special to do her hair?’ ‘What are her colors?’ and ‘What’s inside her beauty bag?’
“We didn’t set out to create virtual actors, we set out to create characters who could tell a story for us. But all this is making her more human than she is, so we’ve actually had to come up with an entire back story for her.”
Director Hironobu Sakaguchi, who created the smash hit “Final Fantasy” video game series upon which the film is based, is already looking at casting Aki in another movie as a totally different character. “Just like you would a real actress,” Lee says.
“Final Fantasy,” which opens July 11, is being hailed for its use of revolutionary computer technology.
Until now, digitized characters have been restricted to creatures such as Jar Jar Binks and Stuart Little. Creating believable-looking people with proper skin and hair texture and plausible facial expressions has been much more difficult.
But Aki, voiced by actress Ming-Na, looks eerily realistic: her shiny black hair stirs in the breeze, she has a smattering of moles on her neck, and her brow furrows with anxiety as she faces down each new enemy attack.
“A lot of advances had to go into how light enters the skin and warms it up, how it reflects,” says Lee. “A lot of anatomy books were circulated among the animators.”
More than 200 people – a combination of gamers and computer whizzes who had worked on movies like “Titanic,” “The Matrix” and “A Bug’s Life” – spent four years at a custom-built $45 million studio in Honolulu, developing the technology and then creating a virtual world.
The characters in “Final Fantasy” – voiced by actors Donald Sutherland, Steve Buscemi, James Woods and Alec Baldwin – are neither live action nor animation as we know it.
“We call them hyper-real – we just don’t know what else to call it,” Lee says. “It’s a new aesthetic that’s a convergence between what you see in a lot of gaming and what you’ve come to expect from the motion picture experience.”
So should flesh-and-blood actors be looking for alternative employment?
“I think you’ll see more and more of these digital actors, but it’s just a better way to tell certain kinds of stories,” Lee says.
“This technology is for when you want to make a big-canvas movie. I don’t see its utility when it comes to intimate dramas or romantic comedies. I can’t imagine Cameron Crowe making a film and saying, ‘I’d rather do this movie with digital actors.'”
Still, the notion of Aki being dressed by Randolph Duke, bejeweled by Harry Winston and scooping up a gold Best Actress statuette sometime in the future is certainly within the realm of possibility.
“Next year the Academy introduces a category for best animated feature,” says Lee. “So, in a few years from now, an Oscar for best animated performance? Maybe.”
