Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children

That’s right baby!

Just finished watching the new Final Fantasy movie. The quality of the rip is top notch as you can see from the screencaps I took of it while watching. 608×336 24FPS XviD rip with 48khz Audio… not bad at all for a “rush” release. The original “release” had only Japanese subtitles with it. Which was strange, since the audio was already in Japanese. But luckily, later in the day, there was a good english subtitle file that was released in the wild.

I guess it would be understandable not to discuss the actual substance of the story here – because just like any other CG movie, it’s rather shallow 😉 That is if you watch the movie as-is – as it turns out, there’s a whole lot of back-stories on all the characters… I read them up through http://www.wikipedia.com ¹ Do searches on the following FF concepts/characters: Cloud, Sephiroth, and Jenova. The cross linking to other characters and concepts will eventually fill you up on all related storylines. and the story became much more interesting.

As you can see, unlike Spirits Within, which focused on making the models look real as humanly possible (pun intended), visual treatment on Advent Children seemed to be closer to the game since the characters are from it (I don’t really play FF, so I wouldn’t know). Either way, I think this was a good move since it didn’t end up exuding a pretentious effort of “realism” so to speak. When you start watching it, you basically psyche yourself to be watching something like a video game… which helps a lot in appreciating the movie (ridiculous story and all)

Having said that, there’s nothing much more to say than that it was a visual treat. The action scenes made the Matrix look like child’s play, but that’s an unfair comparison since FF isn’t constrained by the physics of real actors.

One complaint is that though the fight scenes showed some really cool moves, they kind of dragged a bit just like in the Matrix – they really could’ve done with less fight scenes and probably improved the story. Also, the camerawork was kinda dizzying.

Overall I’d only recommend this movie if you’re a geek who appreciates the work people put into the production of this film. But if you’re after a great story or anything else that makes a movie “great,” then I don’t think you’ll like this film.