Advent Children Bash

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children will delight two groups of people: hard-core Final Fantasy VII fans and enlightened futurists who have been predicting that video games and movies will slowly merge to form one universal, all-encompassing, productivity-decimating audiovisual medium. Anyone else is likely to ejaculate over the super-pretty visuals but understand little of the rather baffling plot.

You see, Advent Children is a sequel to a popular video game called Final Fantasy VII, except that it’s a CGI movie with wildly hairy characters instead of box-shaped protagonists. There is a “Reminiscence of Final Fantasy VII” feature kindly provided by the producers of the movie (Square-Enix, who are behind the games as well). Unfortunately, all it does is make you realize how difficult it is to summarize a video game that spans four CDs into ten minutes of prologue and so this reviewer thought it better to watch the film instead.

Just one of several Vidal Sassoon models that lent their talents to the movie

Easier said than done. It opens with a flashback sequence that at first glance renders the impenetrable “Reminiscence” feature useless. A little girl explains to us that a realm called Midgar was once attacked by a Calamity from the Sky named Mother, also known as the Jenova Project (or a meteor in normal English) that tried to destroy it. Yes even meteors have agendas these days. Apparently, a corporation named Shinra somehow saved the planet, but simultaneously harnessed all of its Mako (or is that Materia?), a form of energy necessary for its survival. Shinra used Materia or Mako plus the remnants of Mother to create a very powerful breed of soldiers, imaginatively titled Soldiers, to enforce its will on remaining Midgarians. Shinra continued its evil planetary reign until one of its Soldiers, Cloud Strife, betrayed them and joined a rebellious resistance to bring down the company. Simultaneously Cloud battled another Soldier gone rogue, Shampoo commercial icon Sephiroth who wanted nothing less than to destroy the world and become the ultimate form of energy, killing Cloud’s beautiful girlfriend Aerith and others along the way.

Ultimately, Cloud and co. killed Sephiroth, brought down Shinra and saved Midgar. Oh and there was something somewhere in there about Cloud’s Soldier friend Zach dying too.

Unfortunately, this is about all that one can understand before the little girl narrator falls into that horrible dialect of English known as badly translated Japanese and babbles something about the price to pay to trade sadness for more sadness. One imagines that any economics or business school must not be the strongest of branches at Midgar College.

Many inhabitants of Midgar, particularly those dewy-eyed brooding children, are fallen sick with a mysterious illness called Geo-Stigma. Ex-soldier Cloud Strife, who now apparently spends his days motoring along gorgeous sun-dappled highways, is under a similar predicament. On one such trip he is suddenly attacked by the film’s three main antagonists, black-leather clad, decidedly unthreatening, somewhat effeminate pseudo-Soldiers called Remnants. Between pimping and preening for the camera, their leader Kadaj seems to think that Cloud is aware of the remains of Mother’s whereabouts, but the hero tells them to sod off as they engage on a motorcycle-mounted swordfight…which looks really cool until you see the same thing over and over again ad nauseam by the end of the movie.

Cloud escapes the baddies and they go on to bother other people. One of these is the crippled former president of Shinra. When he pleads ignorance of Mother’s whereabouts, one of Kadaj’s goons wanders off after Tifa, an old friend of Cloud’s who lives in a church along with the opening scene’s little girl narrator. For no apparent reason, the goon takes off with the little girl.

Sure his face looks smoother than a baby’s ass, but look at the blade he’s got to use. Would
you honestly do that to yourself every morning?

Even more confusingly, all of the Geo-Stigma suffering children are kidnapped by Kadaj’s posse as well, and brought to a forest that seems entirely composed of Styrofoam. Here he hypnotizes them by going off on a crazy rant about how the planet wants to eat everyone (!)

Cloud Strife catches wind of the kidnapping, and after having a few words with Tifa, Shinra and his goons, decides to go rescue her.

Unsurprisingly, a fight ensues between Cloud and the three leathery dudes.

Surprisingly, the children disappear off-screen in a single frame.

Even more surprisingly, Cloud Strife loses his cellular phone in the ensuing fisticuffs. This is supposed to be important since, for such a fast-paced movie, the camera pauses rather slowly on the fate of Strife’s phone as it falls to the depths of a body of water. Perhaps some Hobbit-like creatures will find it one day and it will become a central weapon in an epic movie that will actually be decipherable to more than five people.

He’s about to get kicked in the face but still can’t get his eyes off her chest.

Most surprisingly, Cloud Strife is rescued by what appears to be a large, swirling red cape from his three opponents. The Spawn knock-off’s name is Vincent, and he also happens to have rescued Sadness-for-Sadness girl.

Unfortunately, if you think Vincent’s appearance is too quick and convenient, the rest of the movie will probably be a blur of nothingness. Basically, in a final bid to find Mother, the three bad guys attack the main city in Midgar the next day. The two stooges park the still-hypnotized children (can you blame them? Who can resist a charisma-dripping speech about how an entire planet is after them?) in front of a fountain and randomly create panic among bystanders. Probably not the most productive way to find the remains of a meteorite, but what do I know, I never played the game.

As for Kadaj, he corners M. Shinra in a high building and demands an explanation (so do we, buddy, so do we). When this doesn’t happen, the enraged villain summons a giant dragon out of the sky, which scares the crud out of the bewildered citizens below, who begin to run circles around a roundabout. For people who have survived planetary disasters before, Midgarians don’t have very good contingency plans.

Cloud and his friends show up to save the day, and they even get helped from five more of their old buddies from Final Fantasy VII. These guys don’t really have names but you won’t have any difficulties recognizing Jax from Mortal Kombat II, Madonna’s Material Girl spelled Materia Girl to avoid legal consequences, and a rather unremarkable guy who gets a big stick to hit people. It must suck to be that guy. Jax gets metal arms and machine guns, Materia Girl a war fan and a bunch of colourful balls, Cloud a wicked motorcycle and some swords…and he gets a stick.

In one of the movie’s most awe-inspiring moments, Cloud jumps up and up and up, getting boosts from all of his friends to soar high enough to cut down the dragon for good…and in one of the movie’s most confusing moments (that’s saying a lot, too), the dragon throws a fireball at Cloud…which becomes his dead girlfriend, gives him words of wisdom, and the final boost necessary to launch himself high enough to kill the beast.

Now take a moment to think about this folks. The dragon is fighting Cloud, right? It throws a fireball at him. Even if we are to believe that its transformation into his dead girlfriend was purely Cloud’s imagination, how does the fire not actually burn him? Better yet, if it is all in his head, how does he actually get a real boost from her?

…Really upset at this turn of events, Kadaj throws a spasm, to which Shinra responds by revealing that he can actually still stand, and that he he’s had the remains of Mother in a small wooden box on him all along. He throws it over the window, causing Kadaj to jump after it. Shinra, seemingly expressing a wish to become a real cripple, leaps off the skyscraper himself to shoot at Kadaj. Cloud, noticing the trend, joins them for the plummet.

A short fight between Cloud and Kadaj later, the latter uses the box to become Sephiroth reborn. Apparently this was his secret plan all along, since Sephiroth has better hair, a slightly manlier voice, a cooler sword, and logically would land more lucrative modeling contracts with leather designers.

There is…you guessed it…a sword fight between the two men, and Sephiroth obviously loses. This happily and inexplicably translates into silver rain that somehow cures all the geo-stigma on the planet, and as the heroes celebrate, Cloud Strife catches another vision, this time of Aerith and Zach smiling at him and disappearing in a halo of light. “Finally I’m not alone,” he thinks wistfully and grins, which is a paradoxical choice of monologue to have while watching the ghosts of your dead girlfriend and very best friend fade away, but as far as dialogue goes, there is worse in this flick.

Advent Children is not, despite what the title may have you believe, for children. There is a lot of violence in it. However, it’s not for most adults either, as there is little in the way of an entertaining story. In fact, if there is one more group to add to the two minorities outlined at the beginning of the article that would benefit from watching this, that would be Anglophone students majoring in Japanese translation. You know, just to sort of understand what not to do with film scripts.

DON’T cut this guy off in traffic.