Holy necromancing!
To be fair, the movie's plot could absolutely have been the plot of a mainline FF. You have an apocalyptic setting, eight "spirits" to collect, a main character and a villain who fit the canons of the series, a space cannon, magical thingamajigs. You'd just have to add an entire team of playable heroes, and to expand things to meet the requirements of a JRPG.
But that was exactly the movie's problem. It was a condensed FF story. Too little, for people who mostly got into the series with the three PS games that had all the time they needed to tell a sprawling story touching dozens of locations. It was a movie for non-gamers who wanted to get a touch of this FF thing that was apparently very famous. My non-gaming gf of the time loved the movie. But yeah, if there ever was a moment when it was very clear that games don't translate well to movies and that the two mediums are necessarily different on a fundamental level, it was TSW.
