Man this was fucking awful.
FF7 was great, so I thought this one would be a pretty safe bet. Looking back I probably shouldn't have expected anything better, but for some reason, I figured this one would at least have the potential to not completely suck. There's a ton of stuff you could've done with the idea that would've been awesome---for example, you could set the story like 20 years in the future and have Cloud be a fat butthole who runs a McDojo in the middle of Virginia, make him get into fights with dark sorcerers (his landlord) or whatever, maybe even get Nicolas Cage
...
to do the VA work (preferably for every character) or some terrible techno DJ (Nine Inch Nails?) to do the soundtrack, and then have like, a final showdown between Cloud and a CGI rendition of Anderson Cooper where Cooper just publicly beats the hell out of him as the entire nation of Japan cheers him on...the possibilities are endless, really. But no, instead of giving me something I can sit down and actually watch for more than 20 minutes, these chimps pulled a fast one and basically gave me the artistic equivalent of a bunch of dudes hanging out in a windtunnel blasting Creed and shitting all over themselves for two solid hours.
Here's what it all boils down to: a bunch of losers sword fight in a church while a buttrock mix CD plays on loop in the background. Actually, that's not entirely fair: occasionally the music will switch up to some ominous Latin chanting or the Babby's First FruityLoops sondtrack, and sometimes they'll stop fighting for a minute to flip their hair and yell about irritable bowel syndrome or whatever disease it was that they were blabbering on about, but really, for the most part its pretty consistently just a bunch of computer animations slapping each other while generic, embarrassing, faux-classical fart music blares out from the distance. If, on a scale of 1 to 10, that sounds awesome as hell to you, then go ahead and pick up a copy of this movie and show it to everyone at your trailer park, because I'm sure it'll be a big hit there, like Nickelback, or incest. Otherwise you can go ahead and skip this one because, Final Fantasy fan or not, you'd probably lose less brain cells falling down a flight of stairs than watching this for any extended length of time.
OK, to be honest, I guess there actually is sort of a story somewhere in here. But you're not going to pay attention to it, because it's really fucking dumb. Its essentially just an excuse to shoehorn in cameos from the video game and to help the audience make some sense of the 98 fight scenes that happen throughout the movie. You know that show Jurassic Fight Club on the History Channel, where they waste a solid hour of your life telling you about the mechanics behind the CGI just so they don't look like complete manchildren whose entire reason for existence revolves around making computer generated dinosaurs fight each other for the amusement of grandpas and conspiracy theorists? It's literally the most fitting analogy I can make for Advent Children. The fanfiction-tier plot is really just to protect the reputation of the director and the screenwriter, because without it, it'd be a lot more apparent to the naked eye that all this film is is a couple of neckbeards making their favorite RPG characters duke it out like a bunch of 10 year olds. I can almost imagine the staff meetings: "Dude, dude, dude wouldn't it be fucking SICK if we had Sephiroth COME BACK TO LIFE, and then have Cloud FIGHT HIM AGAIN?!?!" "Yeah, yeah, and then like, the city they're in? We can call it something totally extreme, like EDGE!!" "HOLY SHIT, LET ME SUCK YOUR DICK BRO!!!!!" There's just no way a completely static, emotionless, fanboy jerkoff movie like this could come about from a production team that wasn't completely up their own asses in FF7 fanboyism themselves.
One thing I can't fault them on though is the artwork. As terrible as everything else was, this movie is infinitely watchable precisely because you can mute the sound and take the visuals in by themselves. There was a stunning amount of attention paid to detail---the landscapes are breathtakingly expansive, objects come complete with ticks and scratches and little imperfections barely noticeable to anyone not looking for them, weapons are tinged with bits of rust and draped in decorative, exuberant, extravagant designs, hair actually seems like its built through millions of individual strands meshing together rather than just clumps, forced on top of each other, shifting in robotic, strictly regimented formations when the animation director runs wind.exe (to the point where it manages to distract from how fucking ridiculous the actual hairstyles are), shadows are cleverly layered and colors blend and uncannily realistic textures pop out with almost as much force as the various misplaced explosions littered throughout the film---it's just really really VIP-tier shit. The animation is smooth and as lifelike as jumping 17 feet in the air to shoot a dragon with a triple barreled handheld shotgun can be, and the cuts/camera angles are exaggerated and topsy tervy and completely vertigo inducing, but in a lot of cases it actually works to the movie's advantage and gives it a surreal live-action type feel. So yeah, no complaints here. If you just want to zone out to some flashing pictures and don't want to be bothered with things like plot or cohesion, keep it on your shortlist.
I already talked about the sound. It sucks. Well, not really. I mean, it's decently composed and sufficiently produced and everything, but the music itself just sounds like someone sprayfarting on a reverb pedal while a chimpanzee bashes a cello over a Casio MT-540 programmed to only play the string synths from 50 Cent's "In Da Club." If you like that sorta thing, be my guest and buy the soundtrack. If not, don't even bother unmuting this movie because you're probably going to throw up.
The Japanese VAs are pretty good. The English VAs aren't too bad themselves, although to be honest with you I only paid attention to Steven Blum because he's the king. Fuck everyone else.
If you're familiar with FF7 you should already be familiar with the characters too. If you're not, go play FF7 and forget this shit, because you're not going to learn a single goddamn thing about them from this film. Seriously, not a single one of them develops or grows or changes in any significant way. No introspection of character motives, no deeper examination of any character backstories, nothing. From the minute you meet them, everyone's personality is set in stone. This might not even be that huge of a problem if two thirds of the cast weren't completely fucking stoic to begin with. I don't know who thought it would be entertaining to watch a bunch of boring chumps prance around for two hours shooting at each other because of some bullshit nobody actually paid attention to, but whoever it was should be sacked, and then hopefully punched in the sack---they're the reason Advent Children is so painful to sit through. Not that it really matters because Square Enix made a gazillion dollars of cocaine/hooker money off this movie alone, but still. You couldn't have at least thrown me a bone here and made characters that were at least somewhat interesting? You didn't even have to make new ones. You had a whole cast of them all ready and just waiting to be expanded upon. Instead you gave me this.
Normally I try not to fall asleep during movies, even if they're horrendous pieces of shit---I managed to stay awake through at least 5 Steven Seagal movies (I was laughing too hard to doze off), Alone in the Dark, the entire Dolph Lundgren filmography, Catwoman, Cool as Ice, Ultraviolet, Collateral Damage, and many more movies that have brought lesser men to the point of unconsciousness. To date, only 4 films have managed to knock me out: Spiderman 3, Pirates of the Caribbean, Jingle All the Way, and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. Make no mistake, this movie is not even close to being so bad it's funny. It's fucking bad, but it's on the complete opposite side of the spectrum from funny. The flashy artwork was enough to keep my interest for about 10 minutes, but once this movie exposed itself as the horrible shitbeast that it is, I was struggling to keep my eyes open long enough to even understand why everyone else in the room was making fun of it. As a piece of cinema, it wasn't worth the DVD-RW I burned it onto. However, if what you're looking for isn't a moviegoing experience, but rather an advanced, non-addictive sleep aid to replace Ambien or Nyquil, this may be exactly what you're looking for. On the traditional 10 point scale, the actual movie is a 2. But the 3 hour long nap I took while it was playing? 10/10, would try again.
So yeah, overall, fuck this movie. Watch it if you like things that suck.
Apr 28, 2012
Man this was fucking awful.
FF7 was great, so I thought this one would be a pretty safe bet. Looking back I probably shouldn't have expected anything better, but for some reason, I figured this one would at least have the potential to not completely suck. There's a ton of stuff you could've done with the idea that would've been awesome---for example, you could set the story like 20 years in the future and have Cloud be a fat butthole who runs a McDojo in the middle of Virginia, make him get into fights with dark sorcerers (his landlord) or whatever, maybe even get Nicolas Cage ... |
