Highly ambitious films driven by big egos and bigger bankrolls frequently sport oddly humble, golly-humans-aren’t-all-that-and-a-bag-of-chips themes.

“Jurassic Park,” for instance, warned of the dangerous arrogance of humanity’s quest for dominance over nature, doing roughly the same thing it warned against: using avant-garde science to resurrect dinosaurs for the amusement of the world.

More recently, “Titanic” was similarly hypocritical, asking us to believe that Titanic the boat was humankind being cocky, but “Titanic” the movie, with its greatly expanded production time and unprecedented production costs, not to mention James Cameron declaring himself “King of the World” at the Oscars, wasn’t equally deserving of catastrophe. Whether this phenomenon is cinematic misdirection or a sort of karmic hedge, it continues to be popular in “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.”

This time director Hironobu Sakaguchi presents a tale about the value of simple, naturalistic spiritualism using visuals churned out entirely by soulless computers. The messages of style and substance clash again here, and, as with “Jurassic Park” and “Titanic,” substance doesn’t stand a chance.

The details of the plot really don’t even deserve mention. Think “Aliens” meets “Ferngully” and you’ll get the basic idea. Anyone with half a sense for quality is going to ignore as best they can the cheesy dialogue and absurdity of “Final Fantasy’s” happenings, and instead shift into a state of awed sensory bliss as they absorb computer generated wonder after computer generated wonder.

The visuals in this film are engaging in a way that no film in recent memory can match. The blending of reality and unreality here is mesmerizing, and the degree of humanness achieved in “Final Fantasy’s” characters is a sheer wonder. Who would have guessed that in 2001, instead of the creepy red glowing globes of Hal 9000, the eyes of computer simulated humans would be every bit as beautiful as yours and mine – probably more so?

Equally surprising is the lead characters’ big kiss scene. Digital lips massaging each other in an extreme close-up sounds laughable, but in fact it is done with surprising sensuousness. Less erotic, but equally aesthetic and compelling is the touching collage of age spots atop the elderly Dr. Cid’s wrinkled, bald head.

Little details like this are innumerable and consistently uncanny, making our disbelief a joy to suspend.

To be sure, the illusion is not perfect. The missing nuances of mouth movement in speech are the most striking flaws, but also some of the characters are over-stylized, and often their movements are too fluid to fool anyone looking for pure realism.

But given the magnitude of the film’s other accomplishments, these are easy problems to forgive. Even easier is imagining these problems being solved considering the mind-boggling rate that technology and artistry are progressing.

In addition to its purely aesthetic achievements, “Final Fantasy’s” nearly video-realistic digital images are charged with a stunning, even chilling portentousness. It is in contemplation of this that the story’s thematic religiosity becomes most markedly bizarre.

If there is an ethereality to the human essence that eludes fabrication – a “spirit within” – how is it that in the span of 15 years computer animators have gone from Dire Strait’s “Money For Nothing” video to “Final Fantasy’s” Dr. Aki Ross, a collection of ones and zeroes prettier and more graceful than we fleshies will ever be? Are we ready to believe that we have souls by computers?

If anything the entrancing techno-magic of “Final Fantasy” will have people asking themselves how much more of the uniqueness of human selves remains mysterious and unchallenged, and for how long.

I imagine that many will revisit the theater several times to be dazzled by these existential questions and the future, both cinematic and otherwise, that the spectacle of “Final Fantasy” suggests.