Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Movie Download

3 / 10

Hardcore Fanservice
If you didn’t play Final Fantasy VII, you’re not going to know what’s going on in this movie.

And if you did play Final Fantasy VII? You’re also probably not going to know what’s going on in this movie.

Advent Children is two hours of manic fight sequences, innumerable flashbacks, and a plot that looks deep on the surface but is otherwise quite shallow. A new team of bad guys has emerged to finish what Sephiroth started back in the original game, and most of the movie is spent doing battle in order to stop them from bringing about the end of the world.

Why do they want to bring about the end of the world? Because that’s what Sephiroth wanted to do, and these guys want to continue his work for… some reason, I guess? Sephiroth had many motives in Final Fantasy VII, but Advent Children’s Kadaj and crew don’t get any back story. They literally materialize out of thin air, and that’s all you get. We’re told they are “remnants,” as if we’re automatically supposed to know what that means. They use “remnants” like it’s some kind of group name, or a term for something that existed in the game. As far as I know, it’s not. They’re just one-dimensional villains for the sake of our heroes having something to fight.

And fight they do. Fight sequences are frequent and long, with the movie’s back-to-back-to-back final battles taking up nearly a solid hour of the overall run time. Unfortunately, fights lack any impact — thin, wispy characters fly around environments totally weightless, somehow punching each other with enough force to send the recipient sailing across city blocks. Mostly, this damages property more than it causes any real physical harm. Anime-style action like this can be done well, but this is like watching a child play with action figures.

The real culprit that destroys this movie is just how much it relies on flashbacks. I am not exaggerating when I say almost every other scene in Advent Children is a flashback, either showing a scene from the original Final Fantasy VII video game, or something that happened off-screen earlier in the movie. There are so many that one flashback will interrupt another, and at one point, a character’s cellphone seems to experience its own flashback. After long enough, it became hard for me to keep it all straight in my head, to the point where I lost track of what was a flashback and what was currently happening. I’ve never had that happen with a movie before.

It’s a mess, basically. Non-linear storytelling at its worst, with flashy-but-vacuous fight scenes, and zero motivation for anyone’s actions other than to invoke a navel-gazing sense of nostalgia.

I put more than 100 hours in to the game back in 1997, and Advent Children is a struggle for me to watch. It is exclusively focused on being “cool” and “epic” leaving everything else to fall by the wayside.Read More