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Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children: Rise of the Machines Review
by Rammspieler
Well folks, this is it. The review that I've been waiting to write about for the simple reason that of all the staff on the site, I am the most qualified to write it, seeing as how there was a time in my life where I used to be a formidable fan of the Final Fantasy games myself. I know that Advent Children has been out for a while through legally questionable channels like torrent sites and p2p networks. But I decided to wait until an official North American release was available because I believed that writing a review based on a fan translated bootleg wouldn't have done this marketing piece of shit movie any justice to it's American marketers when it finally came out. And I was right. All this movie ever proves is a fact that most Square Enix fans know about, but would prefer to hide themselves from because it just confirms there worse fears. That the Final Fantasy franchise has been going downhill for the longest now and Squeenix has resorted to what every other company does when they begin to run out of original ideas. They milk their most popular product for all it's worth until it runs dry, and then some more. This movie has it all: bad voice acting, confusing fight scenes, pseudo philosophical bullshit and fan service all around! Watching this can hardly make me wait for when the inevitable Final Fantasy VII remake game comes out for PS3, because despite what Squeenix says about their tech demo being a tech demo, they know that when you have a fanbase as fucking stupid and servile as the FF VII fanbase, then you just know that you can't pass up the opportunity to squeeze a few bucks more out of the poor saps! But I digress. This is a movie review and not a Final Fantasy VII rant.
So the movie starts out with an text intro which at first glance can be thought of as referring to the events from the past game and how all your favorite good guys and bad guys will be returning and giving you even more slash fiction fodder for another ten years. What the intro in reality means is that the fan has now been suckered once again into paying $25 for a movie that I had the good sense to rent because the 101 minutes of sheer boredom that I passed will never be justification enough for said $25 price tag. So intro passes and we have a recreation of the after credits scene from the end of the game, where Red XIII and his children(?) are running through a valley and up a cliff to see the ruins of Midgar 500 years later. Then we fade out to what happened 498 years previous or 2 years after the events of the game. We have a narration by Marlene, one of the character's adopted daughter, about how after the fight with Sephiroth and the summoning of the Meteor spell, the world summoned a spell of it's own against Meteor and all went back to apparent normality. Apparent as in, the world can be conceived of as a living being in and of itself and that it was so pissed off with humanity that it decided to give all the world's children a disease called Geostigma, out of spite. Most of the characters have gone their separate ways now and only Cloud and Tifa have stayed together, running and orphanage and delivery service. But Cloud, being the whiny pussy that he always was, has been spending a lot of time to himself lately and pretty much complains about how he's a useless piece of shit, and that the world is better off without him, whine whine whine and all that jazz. Then he gets a call to go to some mountain retreat to pick up a delivery. On the way he is attacked by three very gay looking guys with silver hair on motorcycles and some shadow monsters, but dispatches them in what is the first of very confusing and physics law breaking fight scenes. He makes it to the mountain retreat only to find himself get ambushed by Reno and Rude of the Turks, then Rufus Shinra, President of what was formerly the Shinra Electric Power Company and former bad guy comes out in a wheelchair and congratulates him then asks Cloud to help them out in an ongoing investigation that they have been making in regards to a man named Kadaj and his two brothers and their connection with Jenova. Cloud refuses and leaves. Meanwhile, Marlene and Tifa go to find Cloud in the old church but are attacked by Kadaj's crybaby brother in yet another Matrix-esque confusing as fuck fight scene and kidnaps Marlene. From here on out I stopped caring and I just wanted for the damn thing to finish so that I could write this review and install World of Warcraft.Besides being a blatant piece of self-serving marketing and a bore, FF VII: AC can best be described as a fucking shitty movie even if it weren't associated with the Final Fantasy VII name! For starters, the English voice actors for the dub track just can't seem to give a worthy performance, which is a real shame, considering that I recognized most of them as being the voices behind some of the better game/anime/cartoons out there. Some of them at least, because I doubt that Rachel Leigh Cook and Mena Suvari are even good actors to begin with. The performances seem to be forced and out of character. After saying this, I am certain that it will be at this point of the review where any of the anime fanboys reading this will probably write me an angry email, calling me a fag and an ignorant imbecile because it wasn't meant to be seen in English and that Japanese > English and that I'm ignoring the #1 rule of watching anime, which is that they have to be seen in Japanese, even though the original Japanese voices are annoying and don't help to convey the story any better (actually, we never have received any substantial hate mail beyond the ones we receive for our regular Myspace and LJ sections, but one can always dream!). It is precisely because of the last reason alone that I prefer to watch dubbed over subtitles any day. As I've mentioned, the plot and story is nothing worth writing home about. It was full of the kind of philosophical tripe that one can find in any post-Matrix sci-fi movie these days. But hey, at least it goes well with the fight scenes which as I've mentioned, are confusing and inane. I know that in anime and in video games, fight scenes can violate as many laws of physics as they want, but they were never meant to be filmed MTV style, a.k.a with rapidly moving camera and sudden POV changes. I honestly couldn't tell who was winning or losing in a fight. It was these same fight scenes that the sheep over at the PSM forums where praising back in September when the Japanese version got leaked. What really pissed me off though were the special features! Imagine if you will the trailers section on any Disney home video where they whore out their latest direct-to-video butchery of a Disney classic and you will have the special features DVD on Advent Children. Basically it's just various trailers of what will become a whole line of products based on Final Fantasy VII, ranging from even more atrocious traditional animated films to spin-off games. Never has a cow been so thoroughly milked than Final Fantasy VII!
Overall, I can't help but feel like if Advent Children is nothing more than an ambitious direct-to-video sequel that tried to do the original justice, but sucked because we all know that direct-to-video sequels are doomed to suck. The story is basically the same as in the game, but with a newer, gayer looking bad guy that in the end turns into the bad guy from the first movie, but played by an overweight look-alike actor, because they couldn't afford to hire the original actor. I know that this is a CGI movie, but the point I'm trying to push here is, why did we have to bring back from the grave character's whom were supposed to be dead and six feet under for the longest now? Because FF VII fanboys will always cry for shallow emotional moments like the ones found in the game and never got over the death of Aeris or Sephiroth or even a support character like Zack. Really. Who the fuck cares for Zack, a support character that was already dead in the game, other than the obese fangirls who write slash fics of Cloud and Sephiroth getting it on with Zack's rotting corpse? I can hear Square Enix laughing all the way to the bank right about now, while American fans pull out the Kleenex to wipe their tears from watching as they get glimpses of Aeris and the cum stains after masturbating to the fan service that is this movie. Fans won't come to see this movie because of the story. They'll come to see it because much like Green lantern fans, Final Fantasy fans hate to play any other game in the series than FF VII because “OMFG IT HAD ALL THESE COOL CHARACTERS AND IT WAS THE ONLY RPG I HAVE EVER PLAYED IN MY LIFE BECAUSE IT WAS THE FIRST MASS MARKETED RPG AND WAY TOO FUCKING EASY AND NOT CHALLENGING LIKE ALL THE BETTER RPG'S OUT THERE AND BECAUSE IT MADE ME CRY LIKE A PUSSY WHEN AERIS DIED!!!!11!!!” Do yourselves a favor and don't watch this crap. Play the game if you want, but don't watch it. Because if you do, then the terrorists known as Square Enix will win and we will never have another original product ever again!How many drinks do I need for this to be good?: 576
Mastur-factor: 0 (9,000 if your a rabid fan who needs new material to
write slash fics with)
The Stinger: Cloud's whining