What does Advent Children mean to you?

[Wolf Kanno]

A cash grab. To me the film is pretty much Square realizing at the time that they had bled away the creative talent that had made the company a force to be reckoned with in the 90s, and simply took a lesson from the modest success of X-2. They discovered they could easily make back the money they lost from the Spirits Within and the bad PR caused from that whole mess by distracting everyone by bringing back the game that made the company famous.

While I will not say that anything is wrong with the animation, I do feel the choreography and over-the-top visuals clash with what the fans saw within the game itself, which is to say that while it had its fair share of visually stunning and physics defying shenanigans, it never strayed as far into the cartoonish levels witness in the film. This choreography and wanton destruction not only clash with the ultra-realistic visual art style, but pigeonholes the film with the deluge of campy visual choreography fights that films like The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon had popularized in the late 90s/early 00s and popularized a whole medium that is frankly diffiult to take serious anymore.

The plot is weak, largely because someone thought it would be a great idea to release it as a novel separate from the film, which ultimately weakens the films ability to tell an actual compelling story because so many important plot elements are cut out. Even the film directors themselves acknowledged this with the films later Director's Cut trying to fix this issue. Despite all that, the story is contrived and only serves as a means to move the viewer from the action scenes which make up the majority of the film, giving the movie the same format as a porn film. While there is a story in some porn films, it only serves the purpose of stringing together why all these people are having sex, and thus is of little importance to the film.

Sephiroth and Jenova gain new powers as the plot demands, Cloud is placed in a situation to destroy his character growth from the game and simply come to terms with it again, Tifa is still chasing after Cloud and utterly useless without him, and the rest of the cast plots are edited out and placed in the novelization. Aerith continues to go through her awkward Messiah imagery despite the fact that it once again detracts the viewer from VIIs central theme of the Planet itself being a living entity that interconnects us all. Rufus and the rest of Shin-Ra feel like caricatures of their true selves as Reno suddenly becomes a hyperactive physical comedy act when his original incarnation was much more subdued and Rufus goes from cartoonishly evil to suddenly being sleazy but pretty nice guy. The same guy who preached about running the world through fear. This is also despite the fact that watching the cutscene of his "death from within the game makes the hand wave excuse of his survival in the supplement material feel completely unrealistic. Even Nomura mentioned in earlier interviews that the original story of VII created several problems that made the script somewhat implausible, but simply retcon what they could so the film could have all the elements fans wanted to see like a rematch fight between Cloud and Sephy.

So I can't really get behind the writing for this piece of film because it can't really stand on its own as a story, and what plot is there simply exists for fanservice. Advent Children can be a fun fluff film, but frankly I feel The Spirits Within was better because it actually had some substance and a message to it, a message as subtle as train crashing through a fine china shop, but a message nonetheless. I mean what was the point of ACs story? For Cloud to stop feeling sorry for himself and be the hero he wanted to be? Didn't he already do that in the game?

So yeah, this film was made to make use of all the money Square poured into making a high-end CGI animation studio for The Spirits Within, and to try and wipe that stain of a venture out of the minds of the fans by milking their nostalgia. At least we got some good music from Nobuo Uematsu from it.