Diagonaldi Very well executed

Colibel Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Invaderbank The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Ortiz Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Blazehgehg 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? Well, there's a less-than-zero chance 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 thin. 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? Just because, apparently. Sephiroth's motives were many in Final Fantasy VII, but Advent Children's Kadaj and crew don't really have any motivations or even any actual back story. They literally materialize out of thin air and that's all you get. We're told they are "remnants," as if that actually means anything in the context of this movie or the game (it doesn't). They're villains for the sake of having something for our heroes 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 -- characters fly around environments totally weightless, 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. It's like watching a child play with action figures.But the real culprit that destroys this movie is how much it relies on the non-linear delivery of information. I am not exaggerating when I say almost every other scene in Advent Children is a flashback, either cutting to a scene from the Final Fantasy VII video game or to a scene that happened earlier in the story that we only see through a character's memory of it happening. There are so many that one flashback will interrupt another, and at one point, a character's cellphone seems to experience its own flashback. Not only is it hard to keep all of this straight in your head, at one point I wasn't actually sure if what I was seeing was actually happening in the present or if I was seeing another flashback (I eventually deduced it was the latter).It's a mess, basically. Non-linear storytelling at its worst, with flashy-but-vacuous fight scenes, and zero motivation for anything other than to invoke a navel-gazing sense of nostalgia. I put more than a hundred hours in to the game back in 1997, and Advent Children is a struggle for me to watch. It is 100% focused on being "cool" and "epic" leaving everything else to fall by the wayside.

fellebanan This movie directed by Tetsuya Nomura (the character designer/director of newer Final Fantasies) is not based on Final Fantsy VII, but a sequel. One of the first things you'll notice is how good it looks. It's 11 years old and still holds up very well. You can even see dust get reflected in sunlight and stuff like that. The movie is not very colorful, but that fits for the setting. Since it's a sequel to Final Fantasy VII the world is slowly building up again from an earlier chaos. When we talk about chaos. The fights are really fast and sometimes you'll almost not see what happens, but it looks really good with explosions, buildings falling apart and GIGANTIC monsters. Now let's talk about the story. You'll probably be very confused. Especially if you haven't played the game FFVII. It's about some kind of disease and something about Jenova's head and the "Reunion". and then an epic fight against Sephiroth. But seeing loved characters fight again is still very worth seeing. Tha music is partly new and partly new versions of old FFVII music. It usually fits very well. The voice acting is pretty good in English, but for some reason I haven't seen it in Japanese. But this film is still worth seeing since it looks incredibly well and let's you see your favorite FFVII characters back in awesome fights. This is my first review so my writing may not be very good. And YES I'm an "underaged little sh*t hanging around at the internet"

MissSimonetta Final Fantasy VII is one of the most beloved games of all time and one of the most compelling in terms of its narrative. Its story touches upon the themes of the grand epics: love, war, death, family, and courage. The characters all possess depth; by the end of the game, you feel as though they're people you've known for years. The ending was perfect in its ambiguity, which is why I was initially hesitant to approach Advent Children. Now having seen the movie, I know I should have been apprehensive for different reasons: it's a soulless cash grab.I do feel like there was a good story in the basic material, touching on Cloud's estranged relationship with his friends and makeshift family with Tifa and Marlene, as well as his lingering guilt over the death of Aerith. The big issue is that the filmmakers don't care about these things; the whole movie is about propelling us to the next action sequence and re-introducing characters you liked in the game in flashy scenes designed purely for fan service. The new characters are all bland, basically a joke. The story and characters are pushed aside, an excuse to show off the animation (which has not aged well) and have Cloud acting cool for the sake of it. Given how lazy the writing is, it is easy to tell that creating a good story was not the goal of the filmmakers.I'd give Advent Children a little leeway if the fights were any fun, but their execution is terrible in every aspect: the editing is so rapid that it is hard to discern what's what, the faux-shaky cam making that effect worse. The fight choreography is laughable too. In the original game, at least the characters were stylized, so you could buy them doing impossible things at times. But when everyone is realistically proportioned and they are all essentially weightless, jumping miles and miles into the air holding eighty-pound weapons-- I'm sorry, my suspension of disbelief can only hold so much before it snaps. The big climactic fight between Cloud and Sephiroth at the end is supposed to be cool, but it looked so over the top that I was beside myself with laughter. Though people are bruised and stabbed, I never felt anyone was in any real danger. When someone falls off of a skyscraper and they are able to land on their feet with not even the least bit of disorientation, I'm going to stop caring quickly.It's really hard to recommend this film to anyone outside of the FFVII fan base and even then, I'm shocked so many people there love it. It could have been so much better. It actually makes me fear for the remake, which is going to have plot alterations from what I have heard. Hopefully the end result will not be as humorless and dull as what we got back in 2005.

Moebra Johnson Final Fantasy VII Advent Children is a sequel to the video game Final Fantasy VII. The story follows Cloud, an ex-Shinra Soldier who has to stop the three remnants of Sephiroth from gaining the Jenova Cells and becoming Sephiroth again.This movie is just pure awesome. Square Enix has always had amazing animation skills and have always amazed me with their short films for the Final Fantasy games. But this is step up from what they have done before and it is just epic. The fight scenes are fast paced and over the top, but from any action film from Japan you couldn't expect anything else. The story is engaging and the characters were likable. One could complain about how boring Cloud seems to be but people need to remember that he is meant to be a bland person. The film has a huge build up to the final battle where Sephiroth, the antagonist from both the film and video game, appearing out of no where and beating the crap out of Cloud. If you have never played the game it is best to either have someone with you who has played the game to explain things or read a synopsis of the game.