FFVII: Advent Children thoughts

[dvandom]

Okay, so I got FFVII: Advent Children for $7.50 at Wal-Mart yesterday, and decided to watch it tonight. I'm not a Final Fantasy fan, never played any of the games. I just know what can be picked up from general geek culture.

That said, I don't think knowledge of the franchise would have helped much. Oh, there was a lot of stuff they assumed the audience would know and never bothered to say (i.e. the vitally important dead girlfriend whose spirit keeps showing up? Never named as far as I noticed). But even beyond that, I got the feeling that they were shooting for "artistically opaque" a lot of the time.

Of course, the big problem with the plot is that there wasn't much of one. I got the feeling that the writing staff got together and made a list of all the cool fight scenes and game references they wanted to put in the movie, and then told an intern to put them in a placeholder plot while they went out for drinks. So he did so, in a hurry to go out for drinks himself...and they never got around to replacing the placeholder with a real plot.

The animation was pretty good, only sliding into the uncanny valley occasionally. The swords were incredibly stupid, but I believe that's supposed to be a signature of the franchise. The fight scenes felt like video game fights, ignoring physics with a sneering disdain you don't see much outside of wuxia (and even wire-fu people would blanch at some of the stuff that happens here).

All in all, it felt like what it was...a video game passing itself off as a movie. It looked better than FF: Spirits Within, but FF:SW actually had something like a coherent storyline and tried to exist independent of game-etic crap (seriously, FF:AC, carrying around glowing spheres of "materia" for powerups? LAME).

Now to put in the other cheap movie I got yesterday, Starship Troopers 3: Marauder. :)

ETA: Just thought of a good way to describe this movie. It's bad action porn. It's all about the unrealistic set pieces, with the plot barely functioning as a means to get from one money shot to the next.

Comments

[mib24601.livejournal.com]

Which version of the DVD did you get?

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

2-disc special edition. I decided to watch the "remembrance" feature, which seems to be a compilation of cut scenes and infodumps, so now I know more of the backstory. Still doesn't help much. :)

[jarodrussell.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the thought.

[diosoth.livejournal.com]

Yes, sadly, Square Enix made this mostly for people who have played Final Fantasy VII on PS1 at least 10 times through and have likely imported and played the Japanese-only games in the "FF7" canon(each Final Fantasy number is treated as separate canon, with any related sequels/prequels tacking the number on). It's not friendly to newcomers since they assumed anyone watching this would have played FF7, so they did NOTHING to fill us in on what happened. PSP's "Last Order" is the first game, FF7 the 2nd, AC being the 3rd key part, Dirge of Cerberus on PS2 being 4th, plus some intertwined crap Square won't translate for the US market.

Key plot of this film- Jenova was some alien being that crash-landed on that planet Lovecraft style. They thought it was a memebr of some race that used to be on that world when they found it's headless body, so they kept extracting DNA from its corpse and pumping it into people to make super-soldiers. Then there was Sephiroth, who got his DNA shots while he was still in the womb, so he was more "pure". He grew up to become the best soldier, until he found the research diaries, learned he was a guinea pig, and now believed himself to be part of the ancient race which was eliminated, went crazy "Killing Joke" style, burned down a village, and got himself killed.

Something resembling him was resurrected through Jenova's corpse in FF7(not sure if it was Sephiroth or just Jenova using Sephiroth's spirit to regenerate), he tried to end the world, was killed. The dead girlfriend is Aerith(or Aeris is you wanna argue with fanboys over translations- Id suggest not doing so if you value your sanity, though) who Sephiroth killed(turns out that SHE is actually one of the ancient race, go figure).

In this film, 3 Jenova DNA recipients decide to resurrect Sephiroth when Jenova's missing head is found. That's basically it. Oh, and the Jenova cells are killing people now.

Dirge of Cerberus was a result of the series head playing Half-Life way too much and trying to meld FPS gameplay into a 3rd-person RPG. It's mostly Vincent's story since he had jack-all to do in the past installments. It's also insanely hard to win the game on the easy setting(I physically broke a PS2 controller by throwing it out of anger, and I'm not the type to toss controllers), but one of the few PS2 games to allow native keyboard and mouse support over a controller.

[grant-p.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I saw it, and the only reason I had a clue what was going on was that I saw Richard playing it. It has lead to an odd desire to make an AMV with it and the Bicycle song, but everyone and their cousin has used that video, so I didn't bother.

It also lead to the odd idea that in D&D they should have 'detect motorcycle', to avoid getting run over by these guys.

"And suddenly, the laws of motion kicked in, killing the entire FF7 cast. And there was much rejoicing."