
	Year 2005 Director Tetsuya Nomura Takeshi Nozue (co-director) Writer Kazushige Nojima (event scenario writer)
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Final Fantasy: Advent Children

For starters, I simply can’t buy into the claim that Final Fantasy: Advent Children represents a “continuation” of Final Fantasy 7. The film shows its hand in its very first shot: an exact duplicate of the scene that beautifully closed the PlayStation game ten years ago – Red XIII cresting a canyon wall, to reveal the resplendent, flourishing countryside beneath him. Only now it’s “hyper-realistic”, produced with the finest animation technology money can buy in today’s day and age – they manage to capture the right angle and possibly even the same number of birds soaring overhead in the upper-left corner (forgive me; I didn’t count). Then the title card that preceded the moment originally (“500 Years Later”) follows it now (“498 Years Earlier”). Square-soft is attempting nothing less ambitious than rewinding Final Fantasy 7, so they can start over from the beginning. The film is, in essence, a “trial run” for the makers to experiment with, and to prepare audiences for, a graphically revamped Final Fantasy 7 Coming Soon!!! While Supplies Last!!! And gamers are asked to pitch in and help subsidize the efforts of Square-soft Inc by buying Advent Children. This isn’t a sequel; it’s a fairly expensive demo disc (Is it tactless to point out, while we’re on this subject, that the Red XIII scene looked so much more beautiful on the old PlayStation hardware? Poor “Red” looks like a moth-eaten Tigger costume…).

So that’s the agenda. The appeal of the movie can be seen in Advent Children’s last shot (post-credits again): a shot of what looks like a computer programmer’s desk – this too is computer generated! – upon which sits a framed photo of the whole Seven team, beaming and waving. Some lonely souls out in our lonely world dreamed these characters up out of nothing, eventually lavishing so much attention that they became a real family. And that applies also to the millions of gamers who became “the tenth man” in Final Fantasy 7 (questions of why there was never any similar response to Fantasy’s many other casts are irrelevant). As the movie itself promises, it’s “For those who loved this world and knew friendly company herein”…so the movie is essentially a “success” as long as the audience gets to spend time with its old friends, no more, no less. Ideally. I can’t imagine anyone unfamiliar with the now-ancient game to have any kind of “response” to the movie…so let’s stick to that mainline first.

Maybe you only played the game once a long time ago; no problem. Just watching Advent Children you’ll immediately start to remember all the old playable characters: Cloud, Tifa, Reno, Rude, Marlene…Denzel…wait, that doesn’t sound quite right. Ah, no wonder…those last few weren’t the playable characters; they’re just the main characters of this movie. Yes, “the Turks” get more dialogue and screen time than – not to name names – Barret, Red, Cait, Cid, Yuffie, Vincent all combined; they kind of show up at the end to cheer on Cloud from the

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sidelines, privately agreeing not to “interfere”. Personally, I’d imagine that if one of these six was a dear friend of yours, you’d take this movie as a slap in the face. Advent Children laid down a very simple promise, and utterly fails to abide by it. I can’t really speak for anybody, but I’d imagine that Square-soft has deeply offended and insulted thousands of its fans with this film.

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Can we defend them at all? I can dimly understand their reasoning; although I’d have no real difficulty accepting the characters from Final Fantasy 8 or after in a stand-alone film, the seventh fantasy has a problem: the characters resembled Play Mobil figurines, and they were completely mute, even when flapping their lips. The prospect of seeing them as real, live, talking humans is deeply unnerving to say the least. By holding off the main characters’ entrance and instead filming generic actors, it’s less of a shock when they finally show up. Although they were probably trying to ease the transition for fans, it really undermines the film anyway, and they should have just gone whole-hog from the get-go.

Well, whatever; so that wasn’t the type of movie Advent Children was after all; we can still enjoy it on other levels. For example, so much care and effort went into the gorgeously photo-realistic animation that we could simply bask in that instead, and forget about “Final Fantasy 7”, whatever that is. Well, on that note, I have to take a stand that I know is going to be a solitary one, but here goes: I think this film “looks” terrible. I’m not in any way talking about the technical elements of the animation; they’re flawless and stunning. It’s easy to forget that these are not flesh-and-blood actors (Tifa in particular is a marvel, not to mention a real babe). But mechanics by themselves aren’t enough; speaking as the sort of person who could look at “shafts of light” for hours on end, the striking effect of the very best shots (all early on, interestingly enough) wears off rapidly, leaving behind an astonishingly visually unimaginative film. I do not want to go into an extended comparison with the last Final Fantasy film (Anyone remember?! The Spirits Within?), but whatever its successes and failings, it absolutely had a much keener, more refined grasp of dramatic lighting and color than Advent Children does. Everything is shrouded in a dim grey pall, and is extremely tiresome to look at for more than five minutes at a time. And the manner in which the movie’s locations and architecture are laid out is equally disastrous. Early in the film, Marlene “nawwates the back-stowee” over a collection of randomly assembled images showing What Happened After; later in the film, the exact same series of images is repeated verbatim over another, totally different monologue. The utter disinterest in finding something expressive and apropos of what’s being talked about is absolutely appalling. There are way too many “show-offy” shots of shoes, gloves, hair, belts…

Advent Children is actually two forty-five minute films smooshed together to create a ninety minute film. The first one is The Set-Up. Three guys with grey-white hair want to pick up where Sephiroth left off (are these guys supposed to be The Missing Three You-Know-What?), while Cloud is apparently busy being a deadbeat dad. Forty-five minutes of portentous dialogue sets up the second film – a climactic showdown with these guys, which takes place almost entirely in Midgar’s town square. A big monster shows up and starts tearing up the place (apparently one of the bad guys used a Summons Materia…isn’t that cute?!), cueing the arrival of our missing heroes. If this film has a sole redeeming value, it comes in the last thirty minutes, when the characters stop pretending to communicate and a frenetic display of pure motion tears up the screen for the remainder of the running time. Since all the yammering in part one of the movie doesn’t add any depth or nuance to the proceedings, it should have been jettisoned in favor of more of what we see towards the conclusion (In the first part of the film, there are several sequences that aspire to be like the ones at the end, but they’re incomprehensible because they take place within enclosed areas, with the camera shifting on multiple axes every other second. At the film’s conclusion, the characters are soaring around above the rooftops, with lots of open space, so no constraints.).

Any incidental pleasures? I liked the scene where the menacing monster was taking off into the sky, with Cloud trying to pursue him with a mighty leap; each time he reaches the apex of his jump, another one of his friends is on a nearby girder, and he/she uses his/her mighty force to throw Cloud still higher and recites some encouraging cliché: “Do your best!” or “Don’t give up!”; it takes every friend Cloud has, but, by gum, he gets up to that dragon…I also liked the brief moment at the beginning where Tifa wallops a bad guy and the soundtrack suddenly plays the synthesized Victory Theme. Tifa and little Marlene spin around in confusion bordering on horror, and I suddenly jerked up in my seat; was this actually going to be a movie about the game characters as, well, game characters? No – it was just a ringing cell phone…

When I stop and think about it, I’m actually a really big fan of a number of…”fight shows”?...like Street Fighter or Yu-Yu Hakusho, one brawl after another, and I flashed back to these programs watching Advent Children a couple of times. The point of interest was how little time was spent actually moving or fighting in them, instead the focus was always on establishing what was at stake and the main character’s thought processes – only having enough strength left to complete one final move with his opponent still running at maximum efficiency, what should he do? And since every single battle saw our hero at the End Of His Rope, it really speaks to these shows’ appeal, that the constant repetition could remain compelling. In Advent Children, none of the conflicts ever actually seemed to be “conflicts”, just a lot of unhinged motion. Although I prefer the way these other shows operate over Advent Children, I’m not really trying to draw a negative comparison between them: different films, different goals, both appealing in their own way. But with that said…I did notice the difference and long for those other shows; Advent Children struggled, unsuccessfully at that, to elevate itself to the level of a frigging episode of Inuyasha (watching Cloud soar through the sky with his ginormous sword, I could have sworn I heard him scream, “You’re finished! WIND SCAR!!!”).

Acting. I always enjoy seeing on modern Japanimation DVDs which of the two recorded audio tracks is the “default”. For Advent Children, it’s the English one (watch out, though, for the untranslated benediction that opens the film if you just push “play”)…and hoo-boy. This is one of the worst English dub-overs I’ve heard in years, so awesomely awful it genuinely hearkens back to the now-legendary English dub-jobs from back in the 1970s. In fact, on that level, it might almost be worth absorbing…for historicity or a wave of “nostalgia”; aside from a number of voices wildly inappropriate for the characters, it’s full of weird pauses like “Are you…trying” or “Why is…this” (once I think even a lone word got split in twain!). The cruel part of this is that the English actors are for the most part exceptional thespians…I was shocked to discover in the credits that the wonderful Beau Billingslea was stuck in the nothing role of Barret – how dare they! Although Jamieson Price gives the best reading – one line – in the film as Reeve, the biggest surprise is Steve Blum (Vincent) turning in hands down the best extended performance playing, once again, Steve Blum (he’s really a great actor). All of what I have just written is not in any way to suggest that the Japanese actors in this film perform much better; they do not. However, even though I believe they were well aware they’d signed on for a bomb, they give it the old college try and are more tolerable than the North American actors.

The last thought that passed through my head watching Advent Children came when Cloud was streaking toward his final opponent, who threw up his arms to stop him. The radioactive neon marbles they call “Materia” which covered his apparel lit up like Christmas tree lights and I thought, “Hey, it’s Spark Mandrill!” Then maybe I wondered if I was the right audience for this movie…Oh well. If nothing else, watching Advent Children you really develop an appreciation for the outstanding (in their own way) films of Michael Bay.

Could someone explain this one to me: Is this film supposed to be a satire of cell phones? A statement? A eulogy? Or a commercial?

Brendan Lynch

May 6, 2007