Like 2001's Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the French/Canadian co-production Kaena: The Prophecy began life as a videogame tie-in and wound up as a glossy CGI fantasy that looks like a videogame cut-scene. But where Final Fantasy wrapped complicated, showy graphics around a relatively simplistic New Age plot, Kaena matches plot density to visual density for a story that feels like French science fiction (particularly Jean David Morvan and Philippe Buchet's comics series Wake) cranked up to headache speeds, or like a fast-forwarded classic story from Métal Hurlant, right down to the big-breasted heroine with her ass-crack hanging out of her skimpy bikini.
In the English version of Kaena, Kirsten Dunst voices the big-breasted heroine, a bratty iconoclast whose independent ways put her at odds with the desperate submission of her fellow villagers. Driven by a fanatical priest, the fearful humans on the tree-world of Axis spend their days gathering the increasingly rare sap demanded by their gods, actually an alien race of sap-powered energy beings led by fanatical queen Anjelica Huston. Huston is determined to destroy a relic from a spaceship that crashed on Axis 600 years earlier, accelerating her planet's death; meanwhile, a survivor of the crash (Richard Harris) wants to reclaim the item, which figures prominently in Dunst's prophetic dreams. Just to keep everyone moving in two directions at once, Huston's primary loyalist is the last male of her race, and he keeps pushing her to mate, even though the process ensures mutual destruction. Kaena has a love interest who's torn between devotion to her and duty to his village and his creepy, troll-doll-like little brother. And even Harris has companions: an artificially augmented race of super-evolved giant worms who fuss over him and push him in various directions.
With so many plot hooks and so many story demands, it's incomprehensible that Kaena spends so much time on meaningless action. Its heroine seems to run into a monster every few minutes, and the resulting blurry, noisy chase sequences quickly become tiresome. So do the ambitious but sometimes incomprehensible tracking shots that tear through elaborate scenery at breakneck velocity. Kaena's sepia-toned, deep-focus, highly textured world looks terrific when it holds still for a few seconds (though computer animation still isn't up to realistically rendering human forms), but when everything's in motion, it can be hard to distinguish between characters and backgrounds. Kaena: The Prophecy never lacks for ambition; it's impressively packed with big ideas and fiddly details alike, and videogame designer and first-time director Chris Delaporte clearly assumes his audience is quick on the uptake. But given how much visual detail and character complexity he tries to pack into the film's meager run time, Kaena often comes across as way too much of a good thing.