Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children

This is a movie that seems to made for a particular group of people: People who have an * any time they see Cloud Strife do something. The story is simple. Of course, when i say simple, I mean, nonexistent. It's like this: Virus bad, curing it good. And then a little bit of Sepiroth Bad, Cloud good. It really is a brainless film. Just a bunch of graphics, no story, and the only character from Final Fantasy VII they seem to care about is Cloud. But they need to throw in everybody to make it a Final Fantasy VII movie, so they all appear in one big battle to pretty much assist Cloud and sit tight while the rest of the movie plays on. It's like, if the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film focused on Leonardo, with the other three watching him fight the whole time. Not only are the actions scenes long, they are quite boring as well. I don't mind a long action scene if it is entertaining. But this wasn't entertaining. They dragged on forever without a good payoff in the end. Especially the Cloud/Sepiroth Battle. It's like, let's have this long battle sequence that finishes with a simple move that could have been done earlier anyway. The film was beautiful looking, I have to admit. It's one of the best pieces of computer animation I have seen. Unfortunately, the look of the film cannot make up for the lack of story and the abandonment of just about every favorite Final Fantasy VII character.

Weak cinematic follow-up to the hit Playstation game. I think a majority of people who have played the Final Fantasy games consider VII the best (I slightly prefer VI myself), so this was certainly a good idea. Unfortunately, the execution is very poor. Video games and movies are different media, but the filmmakers here don't seem to realize this. They also seem to think that the most entertaining part of the Final Fantasy series are the endless battles, because that's all this movie is. The plot is largely incoherent. This is a mainstay of the series, that the story is somewhat difficult to follow. However, you play the video game for hours and hours and you start to get a sense of the mystery and mythology. You just can't do that in a two hour movie (I always imagined that it might work well as a television series). The film looks awesome and sounds awesome, but otherwise it's kind of a piece of junk. Even the American Final Fantasy movie was better.