Ummm...if you're begging for someone to respond to what you said, okay. Yes, Tifa is much cooler in AC than in the game. As far as everything about the children, I've watched all the bonuses, and that much about the story was already apparent. However, the "children" aspect of AC was very peripheral, and not integral to the actual story. Their part was basically being more prone to geostigma infection and being turned by Kadaj. That's kind of it. They made a circle around the Meteor memorial, but why? It didn't have anything to do with Bahamut Sin, as Kadaj summoned him on his own.

This is what I meant about S-E doing AC ass-backwards. The story should always be the focus of any movie (or even "visual work," especially if you're asking an audience to sit in front of it for an hour and a half), not half-thought-out filler between action sequences.

Don't get me wrong. I don't hate Advent Children in the least. I love it for what it is, but being as hardcore a FF fan as I am, I'm not about to put on blinders to its glaring flaws.

I liked certain aspects of Advent Children, but as a whole, I found it ridiculous.

My main problem is with the principal conflict, which is the appearance of Kadaj, Yazoo, and Loz. I found their group to be nothing more than a deus ex machina in reverse; they are an improbable existence whisked into being just to create a conflict. Yeah, yeah, there's some padding put in about the Sephiroth clones and whatnot, but the fact that these characters really have no merit except to create eye candy battle segments proves their weakness.

They are irrationally brought into the world to look hot and make a mess. Oh, and also to incite an anticlimactic and improbably Sephiroth cameo, just so the damn fanboys can have their masturbation fantasy of His Royal Badass. Puh-lease.

And also, there's the matter of all the other characters who were to have died in the original game, but come back.

Rufus... we're actually supposed to expect him to have survived because he ducked?! That can't possibly be the best that they came up with...

And neither do they don't explain Tseng's sudden revival. The game gives strong implication that he didn't just pass out at the Temple of the Ancients, but was definitely killed there... however I suppose since his death wasn't explicitly mentioned, the AC writers felt at liberty to bring him back - not that they have any trouble bringing explicitly dead characters back to life.

They might as well have pulled up a crappy fanfic instead of writing their own script... Except for the other aspects of the movie, which did work well.

While much of the reviving is getting much scorn from me, I actually applaud the one quasi-revival that I thought I would hate the most: that of Aeris. Her presence as a ghostly watching spirit works very well, considering it actually is implied by the original game (seeing her ghost in the church, her smiling face when the Lifestream saves the Planet, etc).

The concept of Geostigma was original and fitting. The ironic fact that the Lifestream saved the Planet, but also caused mass infection reinforces the strong theme of life and death being intertwined which was presented in the original. I also liked the idea of the infected children being taken in by demagogues who claimed a cure (the only part of the movie that the Seph-clones didn't get any eye-rolling from me).

I definitely liked Denzel's character. He proves to be a very useful symbolic incarnation of the suffering that the people of the world, especially Midgar, endure even after Meteor has been dealt with; he carries the Geostigma, and also is featured prominently in the parallel "baptisms" conducted first by Kadaj, and later by Cloud.

In the minutia of the movie, the symbolism was generally done pretty well. The scene where Cloud is propelled by his friends gives a very strong symbolic imagery, that is pretty blatant in meaning, but not heavy-handed because it can also be explained in terms of concrete action.

The grey wolf symbolism did seem a bit heavy-handed to me. It was somewhat ambiguous, but also in your face, which gave it a kind of tone of being a pretentious symbol. Whatever.

I think that Advent Children is exactly what people try to accuse Final Fantasy VIII of being: it's all meaningless drivel, but hey, eye-candy!

Advent Children is an homage - giving most every beloved character from the original game a short time to shine. Does it really add much dimension to the world of FFVII? Maybe. I'd honestly have liked a low-key movie revolving around the suffering caused by Geostigma ten times more than the movie-length music video that AC turned out to be.