Ya, I never approached it as a Final Fantasy movie, just as a "realistic" all-cg animated sci-fi film, which fell on it's face really really hard.

Oh man, so I'm rewatching Final Fantasy Spirits Within, and I'll be damned if that's not one of the weirdest wide US studio releases I've ever seen. Just everything about it is so uncanny valley and wrong. This would be an interesting one to have a DIF commentary on I think, because it was definitely ground-breaking and paved the way for polar express/beowulf/avatar, but at the same time it's so bizarre that they went out of their way to invent all of this tech for such a lame story/characters.

It's funny, cause I remember being absolutely blown away by the visuals when I saw it in theater's 10 years ago, but it doesn't at all seem that impressive watching it now. The worst thing by far is that they pretty much ripped off real celebrities for the look of the characters, but then got different celebrities to voice them.

There is nothing more disconcerting than hearing Alec Baldwin's voice coming out of Not-Ben-Affleck:

I just think it's not ultimately important whether the movie we see is the one he's writing. It's a story about a man grappling with his moral code vs the constraints and expectations of the genre he's writing in. I think people's familiarity with Adaptation is messing with people's expectations, because they recognize a sorta similar setup and then instantly expect the rest of the movie to neatly do the same thing in terms of Meta structure. I personally don't think every screenwriter meta-commentary story has to neatly wraparound like that, and I don't think they were really going for that in this movie. Its inherently a more playful and less realistic comedy that's messy and plays around with structure. I'd say if anything it's closer to the Big Lebowski or Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

It was just for sale on blu-ray for like 7 bucks on amazon

Seeing that is making me realize the inherent problem with this series.
The most compelling part is when he doesn't have the suit (first 30 min of Iron Man 1).

Like more than anything, I think the most interesting thing would be to see him lose the suit, and then have to take on all the bad-guys without his tech, because then he'd feel vulnerable and be against all odds.

Whenever he's got the suit it's like a movie where the main character has cheat codes, cause he's basically unstoppable and has an endless supply of weapons and gadgets to destroy everyone with, so it's hard to keep the tension up.

While it's definitely not a good movie, I don't think the politics or message are problematic. I have no problem with a military porn movie that glorifies soldiers and is unambiguously behind what they do. Given that literally EVERY single other war or military movie nowadays is about how the CIA are evil, and how the government and military are corrupt and out to get you, it's almost a subversion to have an 80s style "lets kill all the evil terrorists" movie.

Where it fails miserably is as you said, the complete and utter lack of story, characters, or acting.
Some of the delivery's are just so absurdly bad.

I do think there's some cool action beats, I like the whole boat rescue and assault on the compound early on, and I think the interrogation scene is very well done as well (apparently the guy was a real military interrogator, given fake information about the fake bad guy, and told to carry out a real interrogation on him).

But ya, it's a pretty big failure overall, kinda watchable once as a rental but that's about it.

I guess all the Torture and Iraq War parallels did the trick

I hadn't thought about it that way....that's interesting.

I guess my question would be why does he have to be a threat NOW? Isn't it a more interesting dilemma if he seems just like a normal, innocent kid right now, but will grow up to be terrible later? I guess you'd more easily side with younger Joe if that was the case, but I'd say a better way to balance it would be to SHOW some of the terrible things this kid's done in the future. Right now the movie makes him dangerous in the present but tells you almost nothing about what he's done in the future, I think it would work better if he was innocent in the present but we saw some of the terrible things he's doing later.

This will be a fun one to re-watch with adjusted expectations.

Awww, I have a real soft-spot for Pandorum. I love the concept, love the ship design, love where the story goes. If it didn't have such shitty over-editing and out-of-place martial arts, it would be a bit of a b-movie classic.

For comparison purposes, if you want to see how far Anderson has fallen since the mid 90s, I give you this fight from Resident Evil 4:

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Marvel at how literally the entire fight is done in gratuitous slo-motion for NO REASON.