Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is not remarkable for its storyline or even its imagery but for how completely and shamelessly it panders to a very specific audience and gets away with it. Like the Magic Theater in Steppenwolf, it is Not For Everyone — only the people who played the video game and are dying to see something with their favorite characters in it just one more time, even if it was made with near-contempt for said audience. For those of us who don’t know Cloud Strife from Sagara Sanosuke, FFVII:AC is essentially a kabuki performance. It’s highly stylized, elegant to watch, and utterly impenetrable unless you go in armed with the footnotes — or, again, unless you’re a fan.
Come to think of it, if you are a fan, you’re probably not reading this to get an idea of whether or not it’s worth watching; you’ve probably already seen it. FFVII:AC is practically critic-proof, and the evidence is right there in the opening title card: “To those who loved this world, and the friendly company therein, this reunion is for you.” If you are a fan, nothing I write here will change your mind, and I anticipate finding a burning Sephiroth on my front lawn for my efforts. I approached the movie as a foreigner, a man in a country where he does not know the history, the culture, or the folkways, and I suspect for that precise reason I found myself hopelessly lost.
Former mercenary soldier Cloud gets dragged forcibly out of self-imposed retirement
to deal with a new menace to his world that may have roots in the old.
For everyone else, let me backtrack and explain. Once upon a time, there was a phenomenally successful video game called, as you might guess, Final Fantasy VII. It garnered a massive fanbase in both the US and in Japan, and remained popular long after other games of its ilk had fallen out of print. Part of that seems to have been because of the intricate storyline, which merged cyberpunk action with high fantasy, and the characters that inhabited it. When word leaked out that the game designers were planning a short animated sequel to the game, the reaction was near-hysteria. The short eventually ballooned to the length of a feature film and was delayed for almost two years, and when it finally appeared in Japan it didn’t take long for bootlegged copies to show up domestically. People not part of the fandom were (and are) downright intimidated by the level of mania surrounding the movie.
How to review something like this? Without having fifty hours to spare to play the game the film was based on (Final Fantasy VII), I dug up what information I could on the plot (thank you, Wikipedia), familiarized myself with the likes of Cloud and Aerith and so on, and sat down to watch. The last thing I want people to think is that I came to this movie with a grudge; I’m not someone who heard cursorily about them animated Japanese cartoon thingies and is now dismissing the whole effort out of hand. And while there is a recap of some of the game’s key points at the beginning of the movie, it’s like listening to someone else tell you about their summer vacation: you hadda be there. For outsiders, this is deeply frustrating, since nothing short of the Second Coming could live up to the screaming generated in the wake of this thing.
Enemies come for Cloud's girl Tifa, and he's ultimately galvanized into protecting
the things he loves, while the audience wonders what the hell took him so long.
The plot, as best as I can relate it without getting hopelessly lost in footnotes, involves Cloud — the hero from the original game — a few years after the conclusion of the game’s storyline. In the original game he was a mercenary working for a kind of eco-terrorist outfit trying to stop a greedy megacorp from destroying the world; now he’s running a delivery service in one of many ruined cities. He is suffering from some kind of invariably fatal disease called Geostigma that apparently causes the sufferer to mope a lot and act sullen. One day he crosses paths with three folks who believe Cloud knows something about their missing mother, and right about there is where all my comprehension for the goings-on completely evaporated. The vast majority of the movie is one very badly-filmed action scene where a lot of things happen and few things make sense, punctuated by people standing around and making angry speeches.
The problem is not simply that the movie assumes knowledge about the game on the part of the audience, but the screenwriters have compounded that by confusing plotting with busywork. There are so many unexplained (or assumed) comings and goings and happenstances and insinuations that by the halfway mark I was ready to turn off the sound and just watch the movie as an effects demo reel. Mixed in with all this is a good deal of mystical nonsense and tendentious preaching about the environment masquerading as plot, the usual fail-safe fallback for someone who wants to make an Important Statement without actually thinking about it. It’s bad enough that all of this means absolutely nothing to someone who hasn’t played the game; it’s worse that the movie hardly even seems to care. Again, I’m guessing that was scarcely the point — they wanted to extend on a story that had drawn a devoted audience, nothing more than that, but at the cost of locking out everyone who wasn’t there to begin with.
Because so much of the movie's impact is rooted in the game that precedes it,
newcomers to the Final Fantasy mythos in general are liable to be wholly at sea.
But doesn’t it look great? Sure it does; the programmers and graphic designers slaved for years to put this thing together. The future cityscapes look like inhabitable places, not just backdrops. There’s not a shot in the film that doesn’t cry out to be blown up to the size of a billboard. That said, what they choose to do with all this splendor is self-defeating: When the camera zooms around like it’s on the end of a bungee cord and stops on a dime, it’s not thrilling; it’s distracting. Nothing feels like it has any weight. Continuity is not merely ignored but outright sneered at. The characters themselves also look faintly off — there’s always something weird about the eyes and the mouths, like they’ve all come from the same doll factory. (That and I had to ask how they managed to fight when they had their hair hanging in their face half the time.)
The movie’s video-game heritage also makes the logistics of the action needlessly confusing. Example: In one of the early battles, Cloud is attacked by giant wolf-like creatures that turn to smoke when he hits them with his sword. Did that mean he was killing them? Or were they just doing that to avoid getting hit in the first place? And what’s the point of switching arbitrarily between slow-motion and high-speed when we can barely figure out what’s going on either way, and hardly give a darn? Another fight scene has people milling around randomly in the background for what feels like minutes on end when sanity dictates they should have cleared out a long time ago. The movie scarcely seems to care about such niggardly matters, and it’s next to impossible to figure things out via context as nothing is explained or lingered on long enough to be coherent.
The movie's fight scenes come so fast and are so spastically assembled that
nothing seems to have weight and it's next to impossible to tell what's going on.
The problem is that CGI, like conventional hand-drawn animation or even live-action itself, is just a way to tell a story. It’s a medium, and in the words of Ernie Kovacs on TV, it is now definitely a medium in the sense that it is neither rare nor well done. CGI is everywhere, and most of it is lousy — in fact, even when it’s “good”, it’s usually still lousy, because it’s often used to pave over a weak story. When CGI doesn’t try to mimic reality obsessively — think of Malice@Doll and, to a degree, Appleseed — it actually accomplishes more, because we’re not being asked to compare what we see to something real. When we see Cloud and Sephiroth in close-up pushing back amazingly realistic swaths of hair, and then we pop back to see them flying around like toys on the end of lanyards, it doesn’t click. At least when people did the impossible in The Matrix we had some idea why it was like that.
I gave high marks to the original Final Fantasy CGI movie for two reasons: One, it was the first time anything of that scale had been attempted, so I went easy on them for breaking new ground. Two, for better or worse, it told an original story — and while a fair amount of that story had the same mumbo-jumbo arbitrariness of many of the games, it worked pretty well on its own terms and didn’t need a guidebook to be understood. With FF, I have a hard time seeing anything other than sheer greed at work here: the filmmakers rake in a pile of dough milking the characters for all they’re worth, and the fans get to see some new material. Strange how the same fans are willing to write off Disney’s direct-to-video sequel productions, which are no less cynically assembled, but get terribly irate if you claim FFVII:AC is anything less than a cash-in.
Those looking for a reunion with some familiar faces will get it. The rest will be left cold.
It’s not as if there’s no precedent for an upscale movie targeted exclusively at a narrow fan audience. The X-Files movie was made largely for the fans. Serenity had virtually no existence outside of the Firefly fanbase (and if you ask me, that was at least in part due to one of the worst marketing campaigns I’ve ever seen for a theatrically-released movie). But even those were at least remotely coherent to people who hadn’t paid their dues. Fans who talk about the movie ask heated questions like: Where did Cloud get his new Limit Break maneuver to defeat Sephiroth’s final attack? My questions were just as heated, but far simpler: Who were these characters? Why was I supposed to care about them? What the hell was going on?
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I watched some 40 minutes of the movie, and then I had to walk away. It was the same with the game-I played 15 hours of it, and then I just got sick of it. Why? Because I remember Final Fantasy back in The Day.
No, really. I played the original Final Fantasy when it was a new game for the NES. Now, I"m not claiming the original game was so much better than everything else.
But I remember buying Final Fantasy 3 for the Super Nintendo, and I loved every minute of it. The story, the pacing, the challenge....it was all good. Because it felt like someone went through the game with a fine toothed comb, just to make sure it all worked together and made some sense.
When I played VII on the Playstation, I didn't get that sense of detail and care.
And I certainly didn't get that from Advent Children.
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Totally agree with you on all points here. This is a rehash of what I've said about videogame movies in general especially after seeing the promise of what Silent Hill offered killed by a plodding boring storyline, videogame to film transitions need to branch out and be for an audience not for those who played the game. In every one of these movies it feels like attention has been payed to make sure that there are little throw away details for fans of the game while totally abandoning plot. Its just sad to me I suppose especially with the care that can be seen to have been put into making these films look great. All that pretty with no brains to be had.
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I know I'll probably get ripped into for this, but I feel like I should say something in regards to the commentary made by some people both here on this board and elsewhere.
I hear a lot of people tooting the horns of the older FF games. These people tend to pass off the newer ones (VII and after) as tripe or in terms even less flattering. "A lot of technofantasy nonsense" and whatnot. Ah, but here is where the fickleness of the fans rears its ugly head.
If the games had remained in the fantasy realm, as the older ones did, people from left to right would be whining that "it's the same old crap over and over." But inevitably, in the march to please the masses, they tried something new.
And still, there was bitching.
I don't trash anybody's right to like or dislike anything. I myself frequently take crap from people for being a yaoi/shounen-ai fan. But I've had this argument with many people, including my fiance. And it's the most frustrating, infuriating argument I've ever gotten into aside from the big fuss over The Da Vinci Code.
Yes, I see flaws in Advent Children. But I also see more to it than just the technological achievement. Maybe it's just me. But I don't feel like it was a waste of my life.
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"Fans who talk about the movie ask heated questions like: Where did Cloud get his new Limit Break maneuver to defeat Sephiroth’s final attack? My questions were just as heated, but far simpler: Who were these characters? Why was I supposed to care about them? What the hell was going on?"
That pretty much sums it up everything wrong with this film, assuming that we allready know the characters doesn't mean there can't be zero characther development of any kind.
But anyway, the only reason this movie exists is to cash in the popularity of the game, nothing wrong with that per se, but all the effort that went to making this could have been aimed at something more substantial. Mind you, i liked the game, but in the game the characters don't do stratospheric jumps one after another. But of course, everyone who thinks FF7's plot is so "deep" and what not has obviouslly either 15 years or just has never actually read a book, or played Vagrant Story , heh.
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I disagree with the argument regarding Spirits Within. I felt FF7AC was a much better film and more interesting. (However, I've played FF7 for 50+ hours, so consider me biased.)
Nevertheless, this FF7AC review brings up a few valid points. I would've wanted to see more story and fewer special effects and fanservice. The FF7 game is one my favorites because of its story, so I was disappointed to see it underemphasized in this film. (And it shouldn't require some 50+ hours to get a decent plot. Appleseed is an example of a decent story in ~2 hours.)
Furthermore, this film brings up another issue, one closer tied to video games. Except possibly for World of Warcraft, the last "good" RPG in history, according to most RPG fans, is FF7. People pay much less attention to the new FF releases, or even most new RPG releases nowadays. Perhaps this could be because most storylines are the same old recycled "save the world" theme, or it's because most RPG's take too long to finish. (In spite my dedication to giving 50+ hours to certain RPG's *cough* Disgaea *cough*, I usually drop a title after 10 hours. I just don't have the time to "finish" every title out there that I'd like, and I'm sure there are fans out there that feel the same.) Perhaps vendors should try more original storylines that are shorter to get thru, instead of recycling the same junk over and over.
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This is a small note rather than an outright attempt at a rebuttal, but for Ki:
Final Fantasy 3 (6j), from what I remember, was not all that mythical and fantasy based. It could actually be called the direct precursor to Final Fantasy VII, since you have a lot of focus on machinery as an accepted part of life, rather than a weird novelty. Obviously, it's not the same level of tech, but it's still there.
Again, not a rebuttal, just something I thought about after I read your response.
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I agree with you on many points here. Not having played the game really alienates you from this movie, it's basically a direct sequel and you'd be utterly lost without playing the game through or at least watching someone play it through.
I think they should have done more to make it a little more accessible, but all in all, I guess they really didn't need to.
I liked the movie, the 'plot' was stupid and throwaway, but it was nice to see all the characters (and the entire world) again. I don't give it too much credit, it was a mess in certain places and I don't vehemently defend it, but it'd be a total lie to say I didn't enjoy it even just a little bit.
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[edited]
Agree with you Serdar, the film was rubbish except for the graphics. I've played the game *twice* and - watching it in Thailand, with English subtitles - I was nearly as lost as you while screening AC. Just some expository info for you: the "mother" the three goons are hankering for was an alien named Jenova, which spawned Sepheroth; his motives in the game was essentially that of the movie: bringing mommy back to life.
I teetered between rating this film two, three or four stars on netflix, and finally gave it 3 1/2 rounded up simply due to the tech detail on the graphics... but for someone that is a huge fan of the game and the series (personally I think FF10 is the best of them all, and I've played 'em since the first) - this movie was an incredible let down - the potential of the world & characters promised MUCH MUCH more. Oh well.
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I have to say Final Fantasy VII is quite possibly the greatest game ever made. The story was original and deep.Yeah, the beginning of the game was a drag and I about turned it off, but then the story unfolds and I couldn't stop playing. When Sephiroth kills Aeris at the end of the first disc of the game I was determined emotionally to finish the game to defeat Sephiroth. Yeah, if you haven't played the game, FF7:AC would be a turnoff, but to me it was a masterpiece, just try to play FF7 and all the pieces will come together. If ya don't know the storyline, don't trash talk something you don't know about or u might have a burning Sephiroth in your front yard LOL!Just Kidding.
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Oh well... The review was nice and interesting, but personally, I don't really think that was necessary to write so much about it. FFVII advent children is not a strictly movie per definition, it's more likely to be a sort of fan-service/extention of FFVII (the original game). The DVD was launched on a very reduced scale at first (in Japan) because it was only made for a specific audience, but the success among FF VII fans made it become widely distributed in the world.
One possible reason to explain the origin of the "movie" was the fact that the game never showed a "real" ending at the end of the game. FFVII acted as an answer as well as a sort of tribute for fans who continued to worship the game after so many years. It's more likely to be interpreted as a sort of thanking for the loyal FF VII fans.
Therefore, the concept of the "movie" is based on the game experience, nostalgia you felt when you played the game, and writing 6 or 7 pages on a universe you never ever felt once would be similar for someone to try and resolve Fermat's last theorem without a single notion of mathematics. It's hard, demanding, and at the end, frustrating for anyone.
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I've seen this movie and I have to say I rather liked it and i'm someone who DESPISE FFVII, yes if there is one rpg game I hate it's FFVII. Before you all start to flame me about this, the reasons I hate the game is because of the feeling it gave me when I played somehow I could not see where the great storyline that most people who played the game raved about was. So anyway the only reasons I went to see the movie was because it was a CG movie, even if didn't provide much in term of a story it did feel like and extention of the game, a closure or even a lost chapter and we did see Sephiroth die again!. Seeing that this a movie that was based of a game they could have done MUCH MUCH worse, Street Figther anyone? So we can all be thankfull that this movie was not made by americans whom wanted to cash in on a game product which happen more than often and leave the fans with death wisho toward the people who made the adaptation, at least THIS movie was made for the Fans.
While it's not the best game movie it is certainly not the worse so I would gave it a score of a little above the normal average.
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For what was among the more slowly-paced, darker, eerier, and grimmer games in Square's history, a Matrix Reloaded-y random action dump seems like an altogether silly way to follow up. The people who originally played Final Fantasy VII have ostensibly grown up since. Square's only sign of acknowledgment was Cloud's hairstyle adjustment.
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I am an artist and hope to get in the CG field soon. I watched this movie not only because I enjoyed half of the game(I'm not very patient with RPG 's), but mainly for the graphics and of course like you mentioned, just to see the characters again. I do also care about the plot and I do agree that the plot isn't as decent as it could've been, but it turned out to be one of my favorite movies. Reason why is because the movie has captured my total attention during the time I was watching it.
This is a movie of a certain genre and it has it's own beauty. The characters are anime, that is why they have enlarged eyes, narrow noses, and lowered eyebrows. That is the basic face of most anime. I feel that some of your comments towards the movie are irrelevant to the real point. You mentioned that they fly around like little toys and the camera's movements are distracting. Why did that not bother me AT ALL?
Why can't you just accept what it is; a realisticly textured world of incredible beauty and gravity-defying action? Yes, Kadaj's face is covered half-way by his hair, so what? YOU'RE the one who has tied the real world with fantasy. Why can't you just watch a movie and leave all your "real world" expectations behind? This a movie and things don't have to make sense because it's not real and we all know it, yet you're the one who watched the movie while holding all your real world expectations and now you're all confused about how the heck they fight with hair covering their faces. ETCETCETC~~
You feel that The Matrix is understandable because that movie have matched your real world expectations. Well you know what? Advent Children is beyond all that. Just watch the damn movie and while you're at it, BE IN the world of that movie, and ACCEPT IT. Hell, Tifa faints from getting smashed into benches and all. But why does Cloud not die when he falls from such an incredible height? I DON'T NEED TO KNOW AND I DON'T HAVE TO AND STILL ENJOY THE MOVIE. You should too.
[I agree that with any movie you should always be able to suspend disbelief and enjoy the ride. But with this movie, I felt like I was being asked to not only suspend disbelief, but to downright levitate it -- and for characters that I not only didn't know but was prevented from knowing in any real way because the film operated on the assumed knowledge that we DID know them. The movie works as an adjunct to the FF saga and it certainly works as a sample of what can be done with CGI, but as a story on its own terms it falls flat on its face. --ed]
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I personally loved the game, never played it all the way through, but watched my younger brother play it all night for a whole year...three times. Great game, great movie. Yes, it was FOR the fans. And hey, so what, the company made its money back for Spirits Within(which I LOVED TOO!)
NOW...here is my BEEF!! Dammit, i want to see a movie made out of Final Fantasy 8, gunblades and all. In my opinion, my brother would slit my throat for this, but FF8 rips FF7 a new one, the story is great. Probably because of the age difference, 8 felt more like a teenagers game, and FF7 because of the type of characters felt like a pre-teen game...but i lvoe them both, and still want to see FF8 made a movie or a series. I dont care, really, as long as they make another Batman movie.:)
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I didn't know anything about FF7 before I watched this film, and I picked up the storyline fairly quickly. I thought that the movie was really good, with amazing graphics and a god storyline. I do agree though that there could have been a bit more story and a bit less fast fighting scenes.
After I watched the film, I looked around for background information, and then re-watched it. The film did make more sense then and I now know who some of the other characters were in the film, but I found that I could understand the film without the background information.
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