Review: Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children

I almost feel like I shouldn't be reviewing this because A) I have not played the game that this is based on and B) My opinion seems to strangly vary greatly from most of the reviews I have seen of this movie. But what the hell, it's my blog, "I do what I want".

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is an entirely CGI movie by Square Enix based on the game Final Fantasy VII for PS1 and PC. It starrs Cloud as the main character, with Tifa on the side and Sephiroth as the antagonist.

What I got from the plot was that these people are living on a small planet (only way to justify the ultra-low gravity) which gets its energy from an energy river called the Lifestream. A power company figured out how to use the Lifestream as an energy source and began draining the stream for electricity. The planet got mad at the humans for doing this and punished them by removing all the energy water and causing both massive destruction somehow and a kind of plague or disease called "geostigma" (I would assume "geostigma" was meant to be broken down into "geo" or "geographic" meaning the planet and "stigma" meaning "mark" or "scar") it also orphaned a lot of little kids who sit helplessly on the streets clutching their scars. Instead of fixing up the cities and using solar power to get energy for everything, the people walk the streets almost randomly and tell the children that they should be sad because that is the price for stopping the wars. The people who originally guarded and worked at the power company want to apologize to the planet and fix things up, while the "bad dudes" want to steal the head of some kind of biomechanical robot thing and use it to do some "reunion" ritual to take revenge on the planet. (If you want the real plot, go to the wikipedia article and scroll to the "plot" section)

SO, first, let's get the cons out of the way:

No movie is without its flaws. Having not played the game FFVII, I can say that yes the story is a bit confusing and that they have a habit of randomly throwing new characters into the scene without any formal introduction (these people were probably all in the game). Although the characters look mostly real, they almost never show any kind of scratches or wounds from the epic battles they have. There are many technical oddities such as the fact that they have pistol-like weapons but they are slow enough that good reflexes with a blade can easily block the bullets and if the bullets hit anything they are about as effective as throwing a rock at someone. There are many, MANY actions in this movie that would make a physics professor cry, but hey, it doesn't take place on Earth, right? The camera is sometimes oddly jerky, the characters do not change much throughout the story, and there are a few places where the translation to English didn't keep the original meaning of the Japanese (I watched it in Japanese with English subs).


Now the pros:

The above may seem like a bucketful of flaws, but despite those I liked this movie a lot. First of all, the CG in the movie is very beautiful and well done, portraying a very artistic view and allowing the developers to blend as much special effects in as possible. The fight scenes are truly epic and are on par with some of the fight scenes in The Matrix. Even if you do not understand the story, the movie is still filled with a lot of emotion that will attach you with the main characters and even the enemies a bit. Finally, Square Enix has cleverly snuck in some humor as well, strangely having a lot to do with cell phones.

If you can ignore the flaws, which I easily did, this is a great movie overall. On my usual scale of 1-10, I give this a 9