Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.

Cloud Strife returns to action - but he's not quite the man he was...

Release Date: Sept. 14, 2005 (theatrical version). Approx. 126 minutes ("Complete Edition"). Written by: Kazushige Nojima. Directed by: Tetsuya Nomura. Produced by: Yoshinori Kitase, Shinji Hashimoto, Ichiro Hazama.


THE PLOT:

It has been two years since Cloud Strife and his friends defeated Sephiroth and saved the world. The once-powerful Shinra Corporation is now reviled, and Shinra is also being blamed for the rise of a new disease: Geostigma, a mysterious illness that afflicts people apparently at random and has no cure. Cloud and Tifa have taken in Denzel, an orphan afflicted with the stigma, and Cloud has been searching for a cure... but has also come down with the disease himself!

Cloud is summoned to a meeting with Rufus Shinra, the former president of the corporation. Rufus informs Cloud that a new threat is rising: Kadaj, Loz, and Yazoo, three Sephiroth remnants who will stop at nothing to be reunited with their "Mother" - the alien Jenova, whose cells gave birth to Sephiroth and the other remnants.

Cloud wants no part of a new battle. Kadaj, however, wants to face the man he sees as his "brother," and forces the issue - attacking Tifa and kidnapping Marlene, her adopted daughter. Denzel is also lured by the group along with Midgar's other afflicted children. Now Cloud needs to fight - but he may not be in any physical or mental state to survive the battle!

Kadaj and his remnants: Desperate to find their "mother."

CHARACTERS:

Cloud Strife: As the film opens, Cloud has cut himself off from his makeshift family. He now splits his time between wandering the countryside (presumably still searching for a cure) and staying alone at Aerith's church, wracked with guilt over letting her die. He comes back to himself after Tifa and Marlene are threatened by Kadaj's gang and Denzel is brainwashed by them, rediscovering the importance of his connections with others. And if that sounds familiar... Well, yes, it is pretty much the exact same character arc he went through in the original game, only with a deadly disease added into the mix. I suppose the writers figured that a recycled character arc was better than no character arc at all.

Tifa Lockhart: She was a main character in the game but has been reduced here to a two-dimensional cipher. She's not a person in her own right; she's just Cloud's Anchor to Humanity (TM - and insert eyeroll). Not helping matters is her repetition of a bizarre, childlike refrain: "dilly-dally shilly-shally," which she uses in response to Cloud's broody moments. I know it's meant to be her puncturing his self-importance, but it plays poorly, as unfortunately do most of Tifa's scenes, which are not helped by sub-George Lucas dialogue.

Denzel: We meet him at a low point, depressed over the loss of his family and the life he knew, and also blaming himself for Cloud leaving. When Kadaj's group dangles the hope of a cure, he's primed to take it. He seems to sense something is off as he and the other children are taken far from the city, but he's not inclined to care what happens, telling a fellow passenger that it doesn't matter anymore.

Zack/Aerith: Cloud's fallen friends receive a decent amount of focus, with Cloud remembering them at different points, particularly their deaths and Zack's urging for him to be his "living legacy." He also sees visions of them, as they seem to reach from beyond the grave to push him to fight. This probably should come off as relentlessly corny; surprisingly, their scenes mostly work, from Aerith sounding peevish when Cloud mistakes her voice for his mother's, to Zack urging him to keep going: "So what if it looks hopeless? If it were me, I still wouldn't give up."

Kadaj: Despite his great physical strength, he is a pathetic figure. He hungers for a "reunion" with Jenova, even though he senses that his "mother" would much rather be with Sephiroth than with him. He captures Rufus early on, then keeps him alive - seemingly searching for an audience and also for the approval of the closest thing he can find to a father figure. He's simultaneously contemptuous and jealous of Cloud, who was once a "puppet" like himself, but who now has a life of his own (if he can make himself choose to live it, at least). English language voice actor Steve Staley does a fine job with the role, balancing the villainous and pitiful sides of the character's nature.

Sephiroth: Of course we're not going to go through a Final Fantasy VII feature film sequel without the return of Sephiroth. Through a series of events that I won't recount not only to avoid spoilers, but also because they would sound nonsensical, Sephiroth returns for a duel with Cloud at the climax of the film. Like most of the action pieces, this fight is visually stunning, with Sephiroth and Cloud effective contrasts for each other... Though in my opinion, his return here is less a requirement of the story than of fan service.

Cloud's group: Barrett, Cid, Red XIII, Vincent, Yuffie, and Cait Sith all make appearances. Surprisingly, it's Vincent, a potentially missable character in the original game, who gets the most screen time of them and makes the strongest impression, while Red XIII, Cait Sith, and Yuffie are little more than comic relief. The best scene for the group comes in an action sequence just past the midpoint. They are fighting a rampaging monster summoned by Kadaj. The monster flies up into the air. Cloud jumps after him, and each member of the team takes turns using their strength and/or skills to push him upward so that he can dispatch the beast - an effective visual representation of the theme surrounding human connections. After that, the lot of them are literally reduced to spectators for the finale... a choice that seems to actively undermine the previous sequence, though I'm sure it saved money to restrict the final fight to just Cloud and Sephiroth.

The brainwashed children may only vaguely
connect to the story... but this sure is a creepy image.

THOUGHTS:

When Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children was released in 2005, its theatrical cut ran a mere 101 minutes. That version received praise for being visually stunning, but attracted criticism for being difficult to follow, even incoherent.

I'm guessing that came from overly aggressive editing. The version I watched - the 2009 "Complete Edition," which restores a full 25 minutes of footage - is perfectly easy to follow. We understand what the villains want and why, and we comprehend Cloud's arc: both his initial reluctance and his decision to finally act.

That doesn't mean everything fits together neatly. The script has a tendency to prioritize set pieces over story logic. Kadaj's group attacks Cloud at the start of the film for no particular reason: Cloud does not yet even know who they are, and they break the attack off just as abruptly as they start it. Even if this is meant to test Cloud's strength, this serves little purpose - indeed, by showing Cloud is weaker at the start, it takes away the impact of seeing his weakness when he later has to confront them.

Kadaj's group lures Cloud out by kidnapping Marlene, so that at least is motivated. But they also engage in a creepy, cult-like mass brainwashing of the children afflicted with the Geostigma. This results in some creepy visuals, but it is only awkwardly fused with the plot. At the point the brainwashed children cease to be of use (basically, when the climactic action pieces start), the film frees them with no explanation, their brainwashing never even mentioned again.

Then there's the comedy relief team of Shinra Turks Reno and Rude. They are presented as unenhanced, ordinary humans, yet we repeatedly see them take damage that should be fatal, or at least incapacitating. Rude gets hit on the head by a metal sign, falling from a great height? He grunts in pain, gets up, and continues fighting. Something similar happens when they leap from a crashing helicopter, not so much landing as slamming into the hard pavement below.

Sephiroth returns.  Just go with it.

At its core, Advent Children is an action movie... and taken on that basis, it's a pretty decent one. The second half is mostly one sustained action piece, moving from an urban battle with a monster, to an extended motorcycle/helicopter chase, until it ends with a duel at a disused power plant.  All of this is a joy to watch, exciting and dynamic as it shifts from one confrontation to the next.  Director Tetsuya Nomura seems to instinctively know when shots should cut together quickly and when a particular image should be held for a few seconds, resulting in some breathtaking individual frames.

The animation is about as photorealistic as 2005 would have allowed, but characters somehow don't fall into the uncanny valley. Because the animation was done using live action models, movements are organic. Characters also blink the way real people would, and their eyes move in reaction to conversations. All of the above could be said of much bigger budget photorealistic animations that have left me feeling distanced from the characters (Adventures of Tin Tin, or Robert Zemeckis's A Christmas Carol)... but for whatever reason, I never felt distanced here.

Aerith and Zack: Visions of fallen friends.

OVERALL:

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is visually fantastic. More impressively, it manages a trick that bigger-budget films have often failed at: executing photorealistic animation that is still engaging to watch.

Its narrative achievements are considerably more modest. It's really just an action movie, and one that's occasionally nonsensical. In its Complete Edition, however, it is easy enough to follow - and taken as an action flick, it's consistently entertaining, while also serving as a satisfying sequel to Square Enix's most iconic video game.


Overall Rating: 7/10. Just on a story level, I'd rate it a point or two lower - but it gets a boost from the sheer artistry that went into it.

Preceded by: Final Fantasy VII
Followed by: Final Fantasy VII: On the Way to a Smile - Episode: Denzel

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