Casual Cogitations

The way you approach Final Fantasy VII Advent Children will have a lot to do with your history as a gamer, and more specifically, your history with the Final Fantasy series. There is no way around it: Final Fantasy VII Advent Children is fan service. Glorious, beautiful, well-executed fan service. Those who enjoyed Final Fantasy VII and wanted to see the story continue get their wish with this film and an upcoming gaggle of games that transport enthusiasts back to the land of their dreams. Everyone else, do a bit of homework on the back story, then sit back and enjoy one of the most visually engaging CGI movies ever.

To everyone who considers anime a superior form of entertainment to American fare: Congratulations! You've just been tricked into watching a Hollywood movie. The plot is something that you could see at any multiplex theater between the months of May and August, and usually the rest of the year too. It's just an excuse to get the hero involved in some dazzling action scenes, and when it's all over, Cloud saves the day in an unsatisfying deus ex machina that leaves everything open to interpretation.

Unless you've played the game (or watched a friend play it, or seen some cosplay, or read some information online), there's no chance of getting to know the characters. Most sequels have that problem, but here it's magnified because the original was about 40+ hours' worth of gameplay. Compare that to a two-hour movie and that's a whole lot of back-story to catch up on. The movie tries to explain things with some introductory narration and willy-nilly flashbacks, but after trying to advance the story for 40 minutes, it just gives up and switches to pure action and fighting. There are even some cute comedy bits early on, but the lasting impression is one of fighting, fighting and more fighting. For old-time Final Fantasy fans, it's a thrill to see various characters reunite and join in the battle, but pulling on nostalgic heartstrings to say, "Hey, remember THIS guy?" is no substitute for real storytelling.

The action sequences are so kinetic and over-the-top that that border on the orgasmic. Characters leap and dive on-screen at a frenzied pace, pulling off some of the most ludicrously jaw-dropping action sequences you will ever see in any medium, ever, like a three-on-one sword fight performed on motorcycles at high speed, with each antagonist leaping into the air from motorbike to motorbike. It is actually too much to take at times, the pace so insane that the eye simply fails to keep up with the action on-screen. The synapses firing in your brain simply start rejecting the information being passed to it, like water overflowing from a sink. You find yourself laughing out loud at the utter absurdity of it. Simply put, you have never seen anything like the action in Advent Children. It is awesome in the literal sense of the word, in that it fills you with awe.

As for the animation itself, it is kind of frightening. Rendered entirely in CGI, the shocking advancements in computer animation technology are mind-blowing, even compared to Square Enix's previous Final Fantasy: Spirits Within film. The fanatical attention paid to each individual hair strand, the complex and varying skin tones, and the small loose movements of each hand as it hangs casually at a character's side borders on the unnatural. It looks so good at times that it appears utterly surreal, completely and utterly impossible for humans to be doing the things they are doing. You have to remind yourself at times that the characters on-screen are entirely imaginary. If this kind of technology keeps progressing at its current rate, the possibilities for filmmaking are staggering.

The people who can enjoy this kind of film are the kind who can turn off their brain and simply ride the film out like a surfboard, refusing to point out the absurdity of the on-screen action, the enigmatic and oblique dialogue, and the erratic and downright obtuse plot points. It is a continuation of a video game with the interaction completely stripped away, like watching only the cut scenes in a game you cannot control. At times, this will make the film frustrating for video game fans.


The inescapable fact is that Advent Children has been created like a video game, not like a film. Like a never-ending cut scene, it lives by different behavioral rules than we have come to expect from a film; it does not need to pay the same attention to explaining itself or having continuity from one sequence to another. One can argue that as a film, Advent Children fails to take these fundamental elements into account—like creating a story that its audience can actually follow—but all Advent Children sets out to do is absolutely blow your senses away; in this sense, the film is a magnificent success.

Just think, though—if some of that animation budget had been spent on story development, this movie could have transcended its status from high-priced fanfiction to a timeless work of art.