Flick Picks 22: I'm not giving a title this time.

This Review WILL contain massive amounts of SPOILERS!, and on more than one topic. You Have Been Warned.

Sometimes, I'm not sure how to approach a certain review. Especially one that may very well lead to angry, geeky, cosplaying mobs coming to my door with torches and pitchforks to demand my head, or at very least, some of my spleen. But, hey, I signed up to write for this site to give you (mostly) unbiased opinions on films, and occasionally CDs and books, based upon my years of experience as a film watcher, and some small stints on the other side of the film industry, learning what works, and what doesn't, so I could help you, the reader, make honest, informed decisions on what you might want to watch, rent, buy, or burn in an incinerator. How then, do I approach something I can't help but be slightly biased about? How do I approach something, that when it first came out, was quite possibly the most divisive thing ever made, based on it being part of a franchise that has, to date, one of the most diehard and loyal fanbases ever, to the point of a religion still being practiced and spread by it's minions among anime and game conventions of any type? How do I approach....

Never has so much disappointment looked so promising.

 That's right, people. I'm taking on my first video game movie. "Ah but video game movies are easy targets." I hear you saying. That why my first is Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. You see, I wanted my first video game movie to have some serious meaning for me. Sure, I watched other video game movies (Super Mario Bros., Resident Evil, Double Dragon), but THIS was the first video game movie I was excited for. The first one I CARED about. I watched it for the second time for this review, the first time being about a day after it's initial release in Japan. This was the first time I watched it with the English voice cast. I had hoped some of what I vaguely remembered through four years of sleep and other movies had just been my eyes and ears playing tricks on me. But no, not only does this film not work as a sequel, it doesn't work as part of a video game franchise, and let's be honest, does not work as a movie either. First, the two, and ONLY two, positive points of the is review. This film is really a glorified tech demo, and as such looks AMAZING. Everything about the visuals just wants to suck you in, and make sweet love to your visual cortex. I will give them that, I love looking at some of the things in this film, because all of it is just so pretty. The second part, is the music, which is provided(mostly) by long time Final Fantasy franchise composer Nobuo Uematsu. And therefore, the music, is, for the most part, impressive and awesome.

We're the bad guys, and we get only FOUR SCENES? What?

But then we get to the plot, characters, and overall story, and that's where this thing just falls into an incoherent mess, You see, this film starts off with one mistake, and that is assuming that everyone who watched this film devoted nearly 80 hours to game released 10 YEARS prior to it, and still remembered verbatim every little nuance of that game's story and plot. When you have a decade gap between story releases, that second story had better be longer than 90 minutes, so that it can do some much needed recapping for those who played the game, and some serious exposition, so that people watching this film who never played the game(the group I originally watched it with had one such person), aren't completely frigging lost by the references to 80+ hours of backstory they've never seen. This film does neither, just vaguely referencing that the 'evil ended' two years before the events of the film, and gives a clunky retread of the game's basic plot: Shinra, an energy corporation, was using the life energy of the planet itself to run a megacity, until some whackjob named Sephiroth found out about an experiment named Jenova, that he was a product of, and somehow this information makes him so angry he decides to kill the world. Until some people stopped him. Just enough, to make people unfamiliar with the franchise say, 'what?' before moving on to what this film was really made for, one of many visually stunning action sequences. This, however, leads to my one major complaint for the film, as a fan of the game.

Seriously, you can count how much screen time they have by their pictures.

You see, I get that it's a sequel to a RPG. And, that in most RPGs, while you do get a supporting cast, the story has to focus on one character, the one you're playing. I get that, but FFVII was different. The supporting cast meant something. Every single character had some major backstory that was explored through the playing of the game, even the characters of Yuffie and Vincent, who were both optional, and completely missable, if one just focused on the main storyline. You learned a great deal about these people, and their stories could've been RPGs in their own right. This movie, however, again, for people who know nothing about this franchise going in, are just supposed to care about a sentient stuffed animal with a Scottish accent, a large talking cat thing, and five other random human characters, some of whom aren't even named, because they get a combined 20 minutes of screen time. I could get behind Cloud being the star of the show, as he was the main character of the game, but did we really have to do it at the expense of shoving seven other great characters aside to try and make a marketable 90 minute action movie? I mean, come on, it's a sequel to an RPG! we couldn't shoot for 2 hours? 2 and a half? Hell, I'll bet if you'd skipped a theatrical release entirely and focused on DVD sales at the time, you could've had a 10 hour runtime, made it a multiple disc mini-series, and the fans would've supported you, had the final product been any good.

I could be the star of my own movie! Somebody call Sam Jackson!

So yeah, what we get is Cloud: The Movie, with appearances by Tifa, and some comic relief villains from the game being comic relief good guys now. Not that any of the characters with more than two minutes of screen times are treated any better. Tifa is the female lead of this story, in that she actually has an action sequence that doesn't involve Cloud, which make sense, as her character throughout the game is a tough-as-nails brawler, a genuine tough gal, with a very soft and compassionate feminine side, that makes you like her, and want to fight for her at the same time. Her action sequence even reinforces this, having her fight off one of the film's antagonists, and winning, at first, until the plot needs to move along and she gets beaten, quickly, without fanfare or incident, just so she can be saved by Cloud, who gets stopped by a unrelated story flashback that will mean nothing to anyone who hasn't played the game. I hate to keep harping on that, but it's Filmmaking 101. If you're making a sequel, than you know that while you have a built in audience(fans of whatever came first), you have to assume you'll get new blood as well, based on the fact that's it's a sequel, so it has some extra popularity. So you have to, HAVE TO, put something into that movie so that any of the new viewers aren't lost, they know the gist of what's going on without boring the regular to tears by completely retreading the original material. I'll get into the biggest offense of that later, but yeah, we completely destroy the entire core of the strongest female character of the game to service the plot.

He just saw the script, and is heading for the director.

That aside, we get a mostly confusing plot where three never before seen antagonists with the unfortunate names of Kadaj, Loz, and Yazoo, are accosting Cloud and Co. because someone, somewhere, has the head of Jenova, and they want it, because Sephiroth, the final, and therefore dead boss of the game, is just so evil, he's pushing them to try and find it from beyond the grave,so that they can somehow 'merge' with it, and that will somehow bring Sephiroth back. And this somehow has something to do with a disease called Geostigma, that is apparently cells form Jenova and Sephiroth scattered from the final battle two years ago, infecting people, including Cloud, and a bunch of children. The Bad Guy Trio pied pipers the children to a location familiar to those who played the game, but it really doesn't have any significance in the grand scheme of things. The kids get apparently brainwashed, 32 minutes in, but this gets dropped 18 minutes later for the forty minute third act that consists of two action sequences back to back. And there's another problem: for a film subtitled Advent Children, the subplot involving children, which eats up a good forty total minutes of the ninety minute run time, does absolutely NOTHING. It means nothing, it goes nowhere, there is NO REASON whatsoever for it to be in here.
Now to a quick nerdrage moment, that addresses a plothole, and goes back to my theme of Film Making 101. At one point, the leader of the Bad Guy Trio, Kadaj, finds some glowing balls that were hidden in a chest by Cloud before the film started. While Kadaj does address the glowing ball by it's proper name, Materia, and while he does explain what Matieria basically is as he calls it, "Powers crafted from the energy of the Lifestream," there are some major problems with this sequence, which I shall now elaborate on, first from a movie standpoint, then from a FFVII standpoint. First, we see that there a HUGE amount of these glowing balls in chest. If he knows what they are why does Kadaj take only one? Second, we see at least three different colors of balls in the pile (yellow, green, and purple). Since Kadaj refers to the balls in general as "powers", do the different colors have any significance on the power themselves, or are they just cosmetic? If the colors DO affect the powers in some way, how? None of this explained, as he just absorbs a green one into his arm, laughing all the while. This is where the Final Fantasy nerd takes over. First: Materia is solid Lifestream energy, but due the story of the game, AND movie, absorbing it into you body is just about impossible, except for certain rare materia, like the black and white materia featured in the main plot of the game. What I mean is, for most people in the game universe, absorbing Lifestream energy like that is pretty much a death sentence, as the energy is A) very powerful, and B) hideously tainted due to the materia crafting process.
Second, yes the colors do effect the powers, and there's five main colors of materia: Green, Yellow, Purple, Blue, and Red. Materia in the game give you access to various abilities, once attached to pieces of armor or weapons. Green gives you magic spells, Yellow gives you battle commands, Red specifically gives you summon magic, Blue acts as support, adding effects or changing properties of other matieria, and Purple, are independent materia that usually boost a stat or give some sort of other passive bonus, like the ability to counterattack. Knowing all that, it of course makes sense that taking a green one into his arm, he immediately summons a version of one of the nastier bosses from the game, the dragon Bahamut. Which of course makes no sense at all, and even less sense as Kadaj, and later Yazoo and Loz, seem to use whatever materia they want to do whatever the hell they want because by this point even the people involved the film realize they're slowly tearing apart the fabric of the franchise, so why not bastardize the entire character customization system from the game, that was a plot point due to the game's environmental message(would YOU want to use something you knew would potentially hasten the death of the Earth, especially if it was made by the company that was killing the Earth, even if you were using it to SAVE the Earth?), and turn it into a Macguffin Ex Machina.  Yeah, in the end, I hate this movie. It's bad from a movie standpoint, in that it's main plot goes nowhere, then grabs a sideplot that goes nowhere, then comes back to the main plot, and does nothing but manage to destroy a huge amount of the city that the heroes were trying to save. The characters are bland and one note, the writing is horrendous, and is a terrible use of a great voice cast, that includes Mena Suvari, and the voice actors who played Jet and Spike from the English dub of Cowboy Bebop. It's bad from a sequel standpoint because literally nothing that would help you emphasize with the characters, the situations, or the world in general, is explained well enough to not be lost, leaving you wondering just where the hell they are (The city of Midgar, but not a single character ever says that in the film, or makes a reference to the fact that city was built in pie shaped sectors), what the hell they are doing, and why the hell should you care. It's bad from a Final Fantasy standpoint, because it takes a strong, if simplistic at times, multilayered story with deep, fascinating characters, and dumbs it down to the level of a poorly written action movie with no real purpose than to show what the visual department at Square Enix could do. Avoid this film. Really, please don't watch this. It isn't worth your time, or your money. This is an embarrassment to video games, and video game movies, everywhere.