I have mixed feelings about this movie. On one hand, it was nice to see all the characters nicely animated. The movie was fun to watch and it was great fan service. But that is what is was, fan service.

I was very anxious to see all my favorite characters again, but most of my absolute favorites were barely in the story. Yuffie is my favorite character but she doesn't show up until the end. Same with Cid, Cait Sith, and poor Red XIII only had one line! This part of the movie was a big let down for me.

I felt that the action was way too much. There just needed to be a break between the bahamut fight, the bike chase, the fight with Kadaj, and the fight with Sephiroth.

Speaking of Sephiroth, I really felt that bringing him back into the movie really brought down the ending of the game. I kind of wish that Kadaj, Yazoo, and Loz were just the villians.

How the heck did Rufus survive that explosion? I think he was only brought back because he was such a popular character.

Also, why is Cloud suddenly so emo? He was over it by the end of the game. And who is this Denzel kid that seemed to come out of no where? Why isn't Barret with Marlene? Anyone who had never played the game would never know that he is her father.

To add some positive things, there were some scenes from this movie that I absolutely love. I thought Marlene's recap, although brief, was very well done and brought back memories of the game. So much, that I replayed VII shortly after I watched the movie and it had been years since I had played it last. The scene with Cloud and Aerith in the flower field actually brought tears to my eyes. Getting to watch Yuffie fight was a real treat for me, but I'm just being biased here. I liked the bahamut fight as a whole. And Cid was pretty badass with that spear. I liked watching Tseng and Elena make the net for Rufus to fall into. It's the only time we get to see Elena do something cool. When Aerith's rain was healing everyone that made me smile. The ending scene with Cloud finally getting to see Aerith also brought tears to my eyes.

So I guess I would give the movie 5 out of 10 stars. Enjoyable but could have been done better.

Well, I'll just post my "review" from another thread.


Final Fantasy: Advent Children was a terrible movie. Sure, from a true fan of VII's point of view, it was just big orgasm after another, but me, I was actually hoping for some substance to come out of VII. In that respect, I was quite sorely let down.

Sure, Advent Children was very pretty to look at, but beyond that no substance whatsoever. The story was weak, the characterizations (beyond token cameos for no reason other than to say they were there) were boring, and cinematography was blah. It was fanboy service. As a movie, it was worse than something Uwe Boll would have come up with.

I have mixed feelings about AC.

Good things:

The obvious higlights of this movie is the outstanding and completely stunning CGI mastery. It is absolutely hyper-realistic and just blew me away that is reason enough to watch, just to make sure it's really that good. The other great critizism about the film was the beautifully choreographed action scenes they were slick, fast and flowed from one action to the other with eye-blistering speed and grace; each scene was an amazing specticle. The characters also made the transision to 3D very nicely (especially Tifa, she looks great!).

The music in the film was also very nice with some of my favourites including the score (and quire) played during the Bahamut Sin fight scene and the remix of The One Winged Angel.
Voice talents were great although it did take me a while to gt used to Tifa's and Cait Sith's is still bugging me a bit because I just didn't imagine him with a scotish accent.

The bad things about this movie was:

Reno and Rude were initially, within the game, cool and collected villains that you thought were utter badasses because of there cool talking, confident, attitudes (well, more Reno than Rude). However, in the film they're just comedians and I was quite shocked by this; it was funny at first but then I just thought what happened to their cooler personas.

The other bad point would have to be my biggest gripe of them all. Advent Children just didn't have much story telling in it. It seemed as if it was a compilation of fight scenes with the occassional dialogue stashed in between. I expecyed to see more scenes such as the one where Tifa and Marlene speaking in the church as well as ones like Vincent explaining to Cloud. When I think Final Fantasy I think a juicy amount of story telling (those bits in between that divides the fighting and draws the player in with engrossing dialogue), however, AC didn't have that and although it was great, as I watched it more and more it starts to run dry cause there isn't much to watch besides the fighting and the odd bits between.