A much better movie would've been deliberately about those Three Boys semi-competently sneaking around trying to pull off their big summoning ritual while also very scared the whole time that one of the level 80 game protagonist characters would find them and turn them inside out.
The story of FF7 was complete when the game ended, if they wanted to tell a follow-up it should have been the story of these Leftover Clone Guys doing an adventure together where they get sympathy for clearly being mind-controlled by Sephiroth, who is Very Mad
Honestly, I would have just scrapped the three stooges and had a different antagonist for the movie - Zagan. What happened to him after he wrote the letter? Simple, Hojo got him. And now he's basically Max from Anarchy Reigns - while he had the willpower to resist the pull of Reunion, as the strongest remaining Sephiroth copy what's left of Jenova is now fucking up his head something fierce with his guilt over failing to save Nibelheim, and the only ones who can help him are Cloud, who's been through the exact kind of psychological torment Zagan's being subjected to, and Tifa, his student.
Making things more complicated is that Zagan is, in this context, functionally Broly and can crush either of them one on one.
Kadaj, Yazoo, and Loz. The only things I remember are their names, which are weird, their fashion sense, which is shit, and one of them was a big punchy boy, which stood out for someone supposed to be a Sephiroth clone.
Ow, come on, it's not because Rufus stay alive a long time in FF7 because he has plot armor that he will suddenly have a plot armor against a thermobaric strike which has hit him in his direct handsome face.
This was a truly foolish endeavour, and if I ever attempt to do anything like this again, someone must shoot me.
But.
Let's talk about Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.
This is one of the first shots of the movie. As the most keen-eyed of you may notice, it is a straightforward reconstruction of the confusing epilogue of the original game, in much higher-fidelity modern graphics. The movie opens on a perfect reconstruction of that epilogue, pretty much shot for shot, in this new style. It is clearly meant to woo and awe the viewer, as well as to appeal to nostalgia, and to set up the basic premise of the movie's very existence: We know you were confused. We're going to explained what happened after the ending of the game.
(One thing this shot does not contain, I should note, is smoke.)
Here's a little bit of irony: Despite the fact that this movie opens on Nanaki standing over the ruins of Midgar 500 years in the future, Nanaki has, as far as I've been able to tell, at most two lines in the entire movie.
So let's go on a journey through Advent Children. I want to explore the movie's plot with you.
Following the epilogue-introduction, the movie opens "498 years earlier," that is to say, 2 years after the events of the original game. Our very first scene is of a white-haired man pontificating about mankind's failures and inability to learn from the past, talking about humans in the second person, while he is being answered by the man in the wheelchair he's pushing. Their dialogue is exactly the kind of exasperating philosophical bullshit which people often (unfairly) associate with JRPGs or Japanese media in general but which is pointedly largely absent from the original FF7.
Then, we see a flashback to the Turks, riding in a helicopter at the Northern Crater. They're investigating something, and we get a horror movie style scene of the camera slowly pulling away from the mountain while we heard radio voices getting increasingly worried and panicking as something attacks the Turks and seriously injures or kills Elena and Tseng.
This is followed by a flashback montage in which Marlene recounts a very basic outline of the events of the game.
This is partly an excuse for the animators to get to animate some of the most iconic shots of the original game in glorious then-moden CG: Jenova in the tank, Sephiroth walking into the flames, Cloud laying Aerith's body into the water, Meteor being stopped by the Lifestream, and "all the fighting, all the greed and sadness was washed away." But humanity survived. We are then introduced to the main location of the movie's plot:
This is one of the movie's most confusing decisions: It shows us the ruins of future Midgar, abandoned by mankind, at the start. It shows us Midgar wrecked by the "Meteorfall." And then it just… shows us that this is still the main location of the game, the most important place in the world, still heavily populated and, judging by all these construction scaffolds, actively under reconstruction.
Now, this is partly because of the trick the game is pulling: As you can sort of see, we are not quite in Midgar, we are in what a sign informs us is the 'Midgar Edge', which is technically separate from Midgar two miles away. We are just outside of Midgar proper as delimited by its top plate, and Midgar proper is, as the movie will later show, genuinely left in ruin and abandoned but mankind. But that's playing games: Midgar Edge is coterminous to Midgar, they're the same urban agglomeration, and Midgar Edge is actively growing and expanding from everyone who left Midgar and is now making all that new construction in the Edge.
That is to say: What this movie is saying in its opening is that, in the infamous FF7 epilogue ending, human civilization was literally just out of frame, hidden by the edge of Nanaki's cliff or something, a thriving modern humanity that we would have seen if the camera had panned just slightly to the left.
This is emblematic of Advent Children's approach to everything: Sure, the plot of FF7 happened, but, y'know… If we actually followed up on the logical conclusion of events shown in the game, we would have a lot fewer of these iconic elements that you, the viewer, are here for, right? What are we going to do, not set the movie in Midgar? We'll pay lip service to that idea, but c'mon.
We both know what you're here for.
Then, we zoom through the streets of the city, as the new threats around which this movie is… Sort of… Centered is revealed: the Geostigma, a mysterious disease which causes a black rash to spread over the skin while internal organs liquefy until death. Its causes are mysterious, but Marlene attributes it to the Planet's judgment against humans. "The Planet didn't wipe out humanity with Holy but did curse humanity with Supercancer because it was mad" would be a wild follow up on the original's "Judgment of the Planet" subtheme, but this is a red herring, it's of course more Jenova Stuff.
Then, we see Tifa.
Notice the red string tied around Tifa's biceps. It will be relevant eventually.
She's the bartender at a new Seventh Heaven. Never mind the fact that Seventh Heaven was destroyed alongside Sector 7, and that Tifa then went on a life-changing journey across the entire world that might have updated her life plans. We know how people are introduced to Tifa, by meeting her at Seventh Heaven where she is the bartender and provides a cover for Avalanche. Therefore, we are re-introduced to Tifa with her being a bartender. Now, there's nothing wrong with Tifa having 'bartender' as her dream job and career she's set on and content to resume once the world isn't at threat, it's just… Emblematic of the movie's attitude to its everything.
The phone is ringing off the wall, but not hers - Cloud's, from his own office, which is in the same building. He apparently operates a delivery service, which is a funny job but actually makes sense for a dude established as: 1) good at riding a bike, 2) good at fighting, 3) living in a world where travel between cities means frequent monster encounters. However, Cloud is not there and has been gone for some time, as Tifa muses before finally relenting and responding to the mystery caller (the conversation cuts there).
Also, she's listening to the radio during this, and there's this line:
This, amazingly, astoundingly, is our first hint that Shinra is still around and active as a corporation, and whether they should even pay any damages at all is apparently not a settled question.
Please remember that Shinra nearly destroyed the world, all its executives were murdered, and its lead scientist tried to unleash an alien god to wipe out mankind.
…
I can't even say that this isn't realistic, can I? Shinra was, intentionally or not, a metaphor for climate change, and…
*looks out window*
Let's talk about something else.
Did you know Cloud is a wolf now?
This is a recurring motif across the movie. It is never explained; there is just a wolf that shows up sometimes, always around Cloud-related stuff, like here, the Buster Sword planted on what is presumably the hill Zack died on and his sword is now being used as a tombstone.
I think some writers shouldn't be allowed to use visual metaphors. If you say "How can I show my audience that my main character is a lone wolf? I know, I'm going to put a literal lone wolf on screen," you should go to writer jail for ten thousand years.
This, and Marlene and Tifa wondering where Cloud is, are our first event foreshadowing that Cloud spent the two years since the game ended walking back his character growth. It is then followed by us finally seeing Cloud, who is standing somberly over a cliff listening to his voice mail. Reno has contacted him with a job offer. Yes, Reno of the Turks. That guy. Just roll with it.
Cue title card.
Oh, and this is where I find out that I have Advent Children Complete. Released in 2009, Advent Children Complete is a "director's cut" version of AC, with an extra 26 minutes of footage. Unlike a real director's cut, however, this is (almost?) entirely footage created after the movie was already made, and as such it can break linear time and add to the 2005 movie references to aspects from later installment that did not exist at the time, such as Crisis Core (2007).
I wanted to watch the original version, to give you the full unfiltered version of what people got for the first time after all these years in 2005, but unfortunately that won't be the case. After pausing and briefly deciding whether or not to continue watching this version of the movie, I decided that I was in no way going to watch Advent Children twice so I needed to pick one and, ultimately, Complete is generally agreed to be the better version of the movie, the one that makes it make sense. There is one glaring exception that we'll get to much later.
Cloud is now wearing a single black sleeve over his left arm. It's obvious he is hiding Geostigma but for some reason the movie is playing coy with this. Cloud suffers from a bout of migraine, and then we flash to this movie's antagonists:
The Sephiroth Junior Crew.
Like, it's not subtle. They're all white haired pretty boys clad in black leather who speak ominously, and they're each a simple take on Sephiroth; from left to right, Yazoo is "What if Sephiroth was young," Kadaj is "what if Sephiroth was even more of a bishie," and Loz is "what if Sephiroth was more buff." Obviously they are directly connected to Sephiroth in the plot, but before we know that we can already tell from their visual design. They're literally Miniroths.
It's a bold stance for the movie to go with "our main antagonists are lesser versions of the guy you remember" front and center from the start.
Anyway, cue fight scene.
The Remnants pursue Cloud on motorcycle, using unknown magic to summon beasts from shadows. There's a canon explanation for what they are but in the movie as it is presented, summoning shadow-beasts is a power that the Remnants randomly have.
Cloud cuts down an appropriate number of monsters and engages in motorcycle dogfighting with Loz and Yazoo, who call him "Big Brother" and ask where "Mother" is, while Kadaj talks to someone on the phone. At one point Yazoo shoots Cloud in the head and it barely draws a drop of blood from his ultra-thick skull, it's great. This whole Mother/Brother stuff is one of many, many instances in which Advent Children's plot is obvious (the Remnants are something close to Sephiroth-Copies who see Cloud as their kin and they're looking for physical remains of Jenova and harassing anyone they think might know where to find some) to a FF7 player but make it sound utterly opaque and like every character is a cryptic lunatic to an uninitiated viewer, which is fine for a sequel aimed at fans but makes it, perhaps, not the best movie to try and make into Squeenix's animation studio's massive redemption story that will amaze and woo everyone in the world and make them all forget Spirits Within, even those who didn't play Advent Children, which is, by my understanding, what it was trying to be.
That is a long way to say that the common stereotype that anime plots are incomprehensible and utterly cryptic is mostly founded in misconceptions or lack of context (sometimes plain racism) but that doesn't mean Japanese animation studios don't sometimes help it by shooting themselves in the foot.
As a fight scene, this services. It's high octane motorcycle action, but it takes place in the middle of a desert and ends utterly inconclusively when Kadaj calls his brothers back and decides to fuck off for no obvious reason. This really just serves to introduce our antagonists and break up the exposition with some action. With the Miniroths out of the way, Cloud heads for Reno's location, where…
Fight Scene Rating: 3.5/5, Proof of concept more than anything.
Sigh.
He gets another voice mail from Barret.
He's an oil prospector.
We touched on this a few times already, but this is it here in black and white: Advent Children's solution to the issue of 'how will humanity go on without Mako to power modern technology' is… Oil.
Barret, the character who embodied the fight for the planet, is now an oil prospector.
In my FF7 playthrough, I highlighted how one of many ways the 90s were a different time was that we were more concerned about 'pollution' than 'climate change' and 'toxic waste' were a more prevalent danger than 'oil' in people's minds. But AC came out in 2005. They have no excuse. This is both character assassination of the highest order, and a bizarre rebuttal of one of the most obvious ways to read FF7 in the post-00s era: "No, you were wrong, it was never about climate change and oil, it was just nuclear power, we love oil." Really? Was that really a clarification anyone needed making?
Rarely has a single sentence made a story so much worse, by not just making the story worse, but also by retroactively hurting the integrity of the original story.
Speaking of retroactively hurting the integrity of the original story…
Cloud arrives at the Turks' location, where he finds out that Rufus Shinra is, incredibly, alive.
Why? Who needed this? Who asked for this? This is literally just bringing back characters we thought were 'cool' no matter how much sense it makes. This is frustrating to me in part because Rufus is responsible for one of the best parts of the movie, but the fact that he is alive at all sucks. Well, at least he looks to be severely injured and wheelchair bound after the injuries sustained in the Midgar HQ explosion… Right?
Also, the movie is angling for outright comedy with Rude and Reno. It's actually pretty funny, Reno tries attacking Cloud just to test if he still 'got it' and Cloud clowns on him utterly.
Rufus Shinra's dialogue makes it clear that not only is he still alive, not only is Shinra still an active entity, but he is still in charge of it. He talks about investigating Sephiroth, rebuilding the world, rebuilding Shinra - he acknowledges Shinra as responsible for the damage done to the world, specifically to talk about how it's therefore their responsibility to set it right.
He still wants more power. He's still looking to rule. Just with 'fixing my mistakes' as the excuse to justify the power to 'correct' those mistakes.
I mean, the Evil CEO Rationalization is flawless. In terms of characterization it's perfect. But they really are just going to… Get away with it. Like, there's a scene afterwards where Rude and Reno are talking about how Shinra needs to atone, and how so many of Shinra's employees have "gone back to work" for Shinra to fix the damage done to the world, and this is framed as sympathetic and sincere!! No!! That's not how it should work!! All of you should be in forever jail!!
They're really going to seamlessly move from Mako to oil and call it a redemption arc. Depressing.
Cloud says Sephiroth's dead, Rufus counters what if his body died but his spirit is still coursing through the Lifestream, which you might recognize as literally the plot of the original game, we see camera footage of Elena and Tseng being ambushed by the Remnants at the Crater, Cloud blows everyone off and leaves.
Meanwhile, Marlene and Tifa are investigating Aerith's church in the slum, where we find out that Cloud has set up a small camp there and been operating out of here after disappearing to hide that he suffered from Geostigma. Marlene and Tifa talk about how Cloud is a loner who just wants to fight alone because he's afraid of letting people close to him, Marlene is very sad/mad at him, Tifa promises they'll scold him together when they find him.
…
We should probably talk about Denzel at some point.
Look, I didn't really know where to put it because his narrative is so scattershot, in large part because most of Denzel's scenes were added in Complete, although he still existed in the original in a lesser capacity. Denzel is a child affected by Geostigma, around Marlene's age. He essentially serves as the 'face' of the Geostigma threat, since Cloud is a superpowered badass who can't really embody the danger and pain of the disease on his own. Denzel's parents died in the Sector 7 Plate Collapse, he got afflicted with Geostigma, and ended up a sick orphan wandering through the slums scavenging to survive, facing rejection everywhere due to the stigma of his, well, stigma. Eventually, he found Cloud more or less at random, and ever since he's been living at Seventh Heaven, and is part of the reason why Cloud has been looking for a cure for Geostigma.
In many ways Denzel seems to be intended to be the emotional core of the Complete version of the movie. He is one of its most prominent characters by screentime, he is a vulnerable orphan, his misadventures serve to both showcase the grief that followed the events of the game, the threat of Geostigma, and eventually the true evil of the Remnants. "Will Denzel make it" is one of the major concerns of the story and the characters throughout. It doesn't really… work? In part because Denzel is kind of a nothing character. He's just a bundle of sadness with very muted emoting. But yeah, every few scenes we get a little bit of Denzel screentime showing us either how he ended up crashing at Seventh Heaven or what is going on with him in the present timeline. The flashbacks aren't indicated as flashbacks, you have to figure it out entirely through contextual cues, so it'd be another reason for Advent Children's reputation of impenetrability.
…
Incidentally it's weird that even though the game walks back Cloud and Tifa's relationship by making sure there is no on-screen confirmation that they are a couple rather than friends and roommates, it also gives them essentially two kids to look after, one orphan they pretty much adopted and one who actually does have a father, except she only brings him up in a single line of dialogue, he never interacts with her in the whole movie, and she spends all of it sadly asking where Cloud is and when he'll come back.
Like. It's weird, y'all. That's not to say Marlene can't have strong feels about Uncle Cloud who helps take care of her while his father is off working long-distance, but it's weird to have made Cloud more of a father figure to her than Barret.
Back with the main plot, while Reno and Rude are discussing their sins, Kadaj decides to attack their location. He dispatches both Turks off-screen, then decides to have a Hannibal Lecter conversation with Rufus. Kadaj and Rufus proceed to spend much of the movie together, and their pontificating at one another is kind of the structural skeleton of the movie and how we get most of our information on the plot, since Kadaj refuses to explain himself to Cloud. He taunts Rufus by tossing him Elena and Tseng's blood-stained badges, but it's a red herring, they're fine. I mention this because being weird and ambiguous about Tseng maybe dying at a remote location while investigating Sephiroth is also something the original game did?? What an odd repeat.
Kadaj explains to Rufus that the whole 'planet is angry' stuff is nonsense, the Geostigma is Jenova's "memetic legacy" living on in the Lifestream and corrupting humans it comes into contact with. This is somehow distinct from the "Jenova cells," as the infected don't seem to turn into Copies or anything. It's more like the idea of Jenova exists as a poison in the Lifestream that kills people, but lacking Jenova's true physical component, they can't form a Reunion. And for that matter, just three Remnants aren't enough for a Reunion either. Instead, Kadaj needs an actual, physical Jenova component, which he suspects Rufus of having, and hiding from them.
This is where Kadaj makes the plot explicit for those who hadn't guessed it already: the Reunion is their goal. They are actively trying to engineer Jenova/Sephiroth's resurrection. This is where we get all the 'Sephiroth will be haunting Cloud for the rest of time' memes, even though Sephiroth hasn't appeared yet, because this movie establishes that the suggestion at the end of the game that Jenova and Sephiroth had been destroyed for good wasn't in fact true, and that Jenova and Sephiroth will essentially always threaten a comeback whenever the circumstances are right.
FF7, as a series, is forever trapped in the plot of FF7, as a game.
With that said, this scene is where Kadaj is truly established as a character. He's a fairly simple character, but he works: he is an unhinged momma's boy, a deranged little freak with no sense of self-preservation who is actively looking to self-annihilate in a display of love for his mother. He is also, implicitly, an aspect of Sephiroth: though he never describes himself as such, he's always talking about acting for the sake of his Mother, never the Big Guy himself, but when he looks at Rufus while kneeling, the screen starts to shake and flash blue, and we get frame-inserts of Sephiroth where Kadaj is standing.
He is, as he will be later described, a 'larval Sephiroth,' incomplete not just in power, but also in personality: He has Sephiroth's love for his mother and his petty sadistic streak, but is a lot more emotionally vulnerable and less megalomaniacal.
…if you're hoping for the other two Remnants to similarly represent different aspects of Sephiroth's personality you'll be disappointed though. Loz's character is limited to "childish big guy who is more sensitive than you expect and cries a lot." Meanwhile, Yazoo has nothing. I mean, he's the more… Graceful and silent of the three, so he maybe sort of, kind of reflects Sephiroth's combat style? But it's a stretch.
Then we get a scene of Cloud standing at the Buster Sword grave and having a flashbacks to Zack, first him being friendly to Cloud while in Shinra, then to their last scene and escape, where…
…this is a subtle change, but it's a massive departure from the mood of the original story. In it, Zack was executed point-blank by Shinra soldiers, Cloud crawled over to his dead body, picked up the sword, and screamed. Zack was his friend, but there's no indication that he made a deliberate passing of the torch to Cloud; instead it was purely Cloud's brain damage mangling his memories and attributing himself Zack's actions as a trauma coping mechanism.
Here though, Zack actually survives long enough to personally hand the Buster Sword to Cloud and tell him "My honor, my dreams, they're yours now. You will be my living legacy." It's a sweet sentiment, but it's a sentimentality and closure that is completely at odds with the deliberate ruthlessness of the original death scene.
Anyway who cares about that, it's time for the best scene in the movie.
At the Sector 5 Church, Loz has tracked down Tifa and Marlene as part of the whole 'find everyone who was part of the Sephiroth confrontation to check if one of them knows where to find Jenova's remains" thing the Remnants are doing. He acts obnoxious and threatening but in a cryptic way where Tifa has no idea what he's even looking for. They decide to fight.
This is peak cinema. This is a revelation. This is the best fight scene of 2005.
Final Fantasy VII came out in 2005. Two years later, Monty Oum would release first Haloid, then, more relevantly, Dead Fantasy 1, featuring Tifa Lockhart as its surprise twist participant, using her visual design from this movie, as well as the specific mode of Materia use introduced later in this movie, and becoming a prominent character of the next two installment. I can guarantee with near-certainty that Monty Oum watched this scene and it blew his mind just as it did mine.
You can blame this scene, right here, for the existence of RWBY.
This is also where the movie starts doing what will be its trademark - blending Limit Breaks into the character's fighting style. Tifa doesn't really have a visual signifier of using a Limit Break, rather she blends Beat Rush, Somersault and Meteor Drive into her combinations, giving it the air of a coherent, fluid fighting style. The motorcycle in Cloud's first fight obscured the human motions of the fighter, but this is where it becomes clear that Tifa and Loz are superhumans; Tifa can jump several yards, kick off walls, recover from being thrown into a wall by bouncing off it and dragging a man several yards across the ground then hurling a dozen feet into the air and tossing him like a javelin. Loz can crack stone with his punches and, we soon find out, flash-step. He can hurl a church pew at a person and Tifa just perfect parries that shit with a contemptuous slap. All of it set to an amazing piano rendition of Those Who Fight, maybe my standout piece from the whole movie, yes, possibly over its new orchestration of One-Winged Angel.
Tifa dominates for 90% of the fight. Unfortunately, that's not enough to overcome the needs of the plot. Credit where credit is due: While Tifa's loss is cheap, it is in-character cheap. Loz uses the pew throw as a decoy, masking his position while he uses his flash-step, a move Tifa isn't aware he possesses and can't be on the watch for, to move behind her and get a free shot at her back with his power gauntlet, then immediately pins against a stone column and uses the power gauntlet to punch her through it. Because the movie emphasizes skill, technique and offensive power over characters being superhumanly resilient, this is enough to take her out of the fight.
The choreography holds up perfectly well. This is extremely skillfully done. The chain of events leading to her defeat are cheap shots but they are cheap shots which correctly exploit comparative character knowledge and tactics to sell how Loz goes from being on the losing end of the fight to a quick, dirty win.
I'm still mad about it, though.
EDIT: Because the ending pisses me off, I forgot to mention. After Tifa Meteor Strikes Loz into the pews and goes over to Marlene, the Final Fantasy Victory Fanfare plays. Except it plays diagetically, as Loz's ringtone, so Tifa visibly reacts to it with concern instead of a victory pose, and Loz gets up and answers his phone. It's genuinely a pretty funny gag if 1) You haven't rewatched this scene 537 times and don't really think about it anymore, 2) Aren't mad about the fact that this gag is the setup to Tifa getting chumped.
Fight Scene Rating: 5/5, Literally changed my life but still mad about the ending
Anyway, Loz knocks Tifa out and seems about to kill her when he is surprised by the Sephiroth Special: Someone chucked a Materia at his head. Specifically, Marlene. He turns around, surprised, and finds the kid standing over a massive box full of what I can only assume are all the Materia the party collected back in FF7 and then didn't use for some reason. Loz approaches her menacingly and we cut away… to Denzel.
Denzel who is approached by another Geostigma-afflicted orphan who tells him there's someone who can cure them, and directs him to Yazoo's Child Abduction Van.
Look. Listen. There is no joke I could make here that would improve on the material itself.
The van (okay, okay, it's a flatbed truck, but c'mon) takes the children across miles of featureless desert and towards…
The Forgotten Capital.
I know everyone is sick of me saying this, but again, these two locations are on separate continents. There's sea in between. Shallow sea with islands in between, sure, but sea nonetheless. And then also a magical forest labyrinth.
Kadaj is now rambling about the Materia Loz found for him, and…
Okay, so two things about this.
One: That thing Kadaj is doing right here, where he melds Materia directly into his body, is, in context, implied to be a power specific to Remnants, and is tied to the fact that they don't have a truly human biology, as previously hinted by their shadow powers (side note, we find in the Northern Crater footage that their clothes are basically just shadow mattered they summoned and shaped into clothing). Humans in FF7 theoretically need to have equipment with Materia slots to use Materia…
…but like I mentioned earlier, the "Materia melding into the body then glowing when you summon its power" is such a cool look that Monty Oum directly applied it to his depiction of Tifa, even though that's not how it work for her. So for years, I just assumed that was what Materia worked like in the FF7 setting, because I was exposed to Dead Fantasy/Advent Children before FF7, original or remake.
Second: Do you remember that small "My Problem with Materia" essay I wrote during one of the updates where I talked about the disconnect between the various layers of Materia's presentation in the setting?
So here's the thing:
Kadaj is the only character in the entire movie who uses Materia. (Aside from a very brief moment with Yazoo and Loz at the end.) Cloud, Tifa, the Turks, even Yazoo and Loz for 90% of their on-screen presence, fight entirely with their signature weapon and the associated fighting style. Loz can do flash-steps, but it's an innate power of his, he uses it before he nets any Materia. Cloud uses supernatural moves at several points like the blade beam, but they're Limit Breaks. At one point, Yuffie shows up with her arms full of Materia asking if Cloud needs magic and everyone tells her not to bother.
Like, from a choreography perspective, it makes sense. You want each character to have a clear, distinctive style instead of everyone also throwing in a Firaga or two randomly. But it just compounds this entire Materia Issue for me.
Anyway, Cloud has set up the Remnants' base in the very same pool where Cloud gave Aerith's body to the waters. He preaches to the children about how Jenova gave humanity the strength to fight back against a planet that hurt them, how they're all his brethren who share Jenova's legacy, then wades into the pool, a dark flow of corruption reaching out from him and tainting the waters, and invites the children to drink with him.
It's decently effective as a scene in part because Kadaj is preying on children. He's not the most threatening of villains, but they have him threaten the most vulnerable of people. It makes him despicable more than it makes him look cool, but there's nothing wrong with a despicable villain. Marlene tries to tell Denzel not to do it, but like all the other desperate children, afflicted with a terminal disease, he does as Kadaj asks, drinks of the water, and his pupils turn into the vertical slits of Sephiroth.
Back at the Church, Cloud comes in not suspecting anything (remember: he's using it as a base camp, he's not expecting anyone to be there), finds the unconscious Tifa, asks her who hurt her, and she tells him Loz abducted Marlene, at which point Cloud realizes that Loz also stole all his Materia but, before he can do anything, he has a Geostigma seizure and passes out.
The fucking wolf is back.
Then he wakes up back in his room, at the Seventh Heaven, where it turns out the Turks carried him after finding him in the church.
Man, that church exerts a magnetic pull on every character in this story, it's incredible. Keep in mind, as part of the Sector 5 Slum, the Church is part of the abandoned/condemned part of Midgar, not the newly expanding Midgar Edge, this place in the middle of like hundreds of square miles of urban desert.
Cloud waits until Tifa wakes up at night, so they can have a Meaningful Conversation. The conversation is broken up and interspersed with other stuff, so we'll get to it in a bit; afterwards Cloud heads to the Forgotten Capital (on his bike; again, different continent), which the Turks know to be their "base" somehow.
Then he has a vision of Aerith.
This is happening literally as he is riding the bike; he's driving, and the screen goes white, Aerith's Theme starts playing, and he is in a field of flowers with her. (This is implied to be because his body is breaking down and he's near enough death to touch the Lifestream.) But, like, with his back turned on her so we tastefully don't see her face, to reflect how he can't bear to fully see her, you know?
It almost doesn't matter what they say to each other (she asks him why he's come, he says he wants to be forgiven, she asks him by whom). I've talked about how FF7 very deliberately avoids that kind of scene. Even though the mechanics of the Lifestream are ripe for it, even though the series has been doing it since the start, here, FF7 refuses the ghostly visit. It withholds the sight of Aerith's spirit, the closure or forgiveness that would bring, except for one shot, at the very end, the last shot of the game aside from the epilogue. It was a calculated way to keep that wound raw.
And here Cloud is getting an actual conversation with the actual spirit of the actual Aerith before even the halfway mark of the film. And what kills me is that Advent Children had the same director, the same writers, the same director as FF7. They deliberately chose to reset character arcs and step right into clichés the original game deliberately avoided, and I don't know… Why?
Do we see Aerith now because there's a genuine artistic intent eight years after the original story to give the players some kind of closure, or do we see Aerith because this movie is primarily a marketing/financial recoup and they're primarily concerned with giving everyone fanservice (in the broad sense, not the sexy sense)?
Whatever. Cloud is pulled out of the vision when the Remnants start firing at him.
Oh yeah baby, it's action time.
His motorbike has sides that unfold to serve as a massive ram that is also a sword rack containing all his giant swords. I love him so much.
However, before Cloud can commit vehicular homicide, Kadaj uses his influence on the Sephirothed children to have them act as body shields, forcing Cloud to brake hard and be thrown off his bike, allowing the Remnants to circle him. Kadaj quickly steps out, but Yazoo and Loz engage Cloud as a team - Loz is really strong and can flash-step to dodge attacks, Yazoo is incredibly agile and wields handguns that can also parry like swords. Cloud responds by dual wielding swords for the first time ever.
Yazoo and Loz may not rate much as characters, but as components of a team-based combat choreography they're incredible. Whether it's Loz using his own fist as a platform for Yazoo to jump off of, Loz launching a wave of broken earth that Yazoo leaps behind to use as cover while firing, or Yazoo drawing an extra gun from Loz's hip while Loz is leaping backwards above him, their coordinated moves make this fight. It's a real spectacle.
While all this is happening, Kadaj simply watches, until the point where Cloud manages to use verticality to escape the other two and make a direct leaping attack on the Remnant leader. Kadaj reveals his own weapon of choice, a katana with two parallel blades, and briefly engages Cloud in a fencing bout where he almost takes the advantage and deals a killing blow before a flying cloak attacks.
Listen, I don't know whose decision it was to give Vincent a power where he turns into his cloak and flies around (it's not obvious from still pictures, but his body isn't in the cloak while he's moving about, it's just a cloak), but actually it looks sick. That design and movement was seared into my mind for a decade after seeing this scene.
Cloak!Vincent engulfs Cloud, holding back the Remnants with gunfire, then immediately pounces away to take Cloud to safety somewhere else inside the bone forest. But in the process, Cloud's flip phone is dropped and sinks into the water.
Fight Scene Rating: 4/5, Teamwork really makes the dream work.
Cloud and Vincent talk for a bit. Of note, so far of the main party we have seen Cloud, Tifa, a brief vision of Aerith, and Vincent. Even Barret has only merited two lines from a voice mail. Of course, Dirge of Cerberus would come out in 2006, one year after this movie - we are firmly in the Vincent Valentine Hype Cycle here, where this character was thought to be able to hold up a whole sequel on his own.
Vincent, and I expect this will be hilarious to anyone who has only experienced him from my Let's Play, has more screen time and more dialogue lines than Nanaki, Yuffie, Cid, Cait Sith, or Barret. Just from this one scene alone.
As for the content of these lines, Vincent has been coming to the Forgotten Capital often and has been spying on Kadaj. He identifies the Geostigma as an autoimmune disease - the body reacting to the intrusion of Jenova's "memetic legacy." He also rescued Tseng and Helena from the Remnants' torture, but hastens to say that they "had it coming" - the Turks were looking for, and found, Jenova's head.
This is what Kadaj and the other have been looking for this whole time. The specific item they've been trying to get Rufus and the others to give up and referring to as "Mother". The unaccounted for piece of Jenova that fell with Sephiroth into the Lifestream during the Nibelheim Incident. I did complain about the ambiguity of what had happened to Jenova's various pieces, which one ended up in which boss fight, and drew implications regarding Sephiroth's true body having fused with the head, but they were just theories, and this film uses the negative space created by the original game's lack of clarity to prop its own plot - turns out Jenova's head just tumbled into the Lifestream and ended up somewhere so there is still an active Jenova organ out there to build a Reunion off of.
All in all, this might actually be considered the closest Advent Children gets to following up on an unresolved plot thread from the game, as much else as it does wrong.
…
If you look it up on the FF wiki, they'll tell you this is actually a completely different thing.
Article:
In Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, though Jenova's remains are referred to as "Jenova's head", the film's staff have stated the remains are merely random clusters of its cells and the term "head" was used due to a lack of an official term, and it stuck.
This is bullshit. Again, remember: Writers lie. At no point do any characters speak about 'Jenova's head' in a way that would suggest they're being metaphorical or using scare quotes. Vincent casually refers to "Jenova's head" and Cloud immediately gets it, because with his retrieved memories, he knows that Sephiroth disappeared with the head and no one ever saw that head again. The most natural read of the scene is that this is Jenova's actual, physical head, and when we will actually get a 'look' at it, it'll turn out to be a head-sized box that is conspicuously never opened (because a decapitated head would be slightly too gory for the rating FF7AC is going for). Whether the 'random clusters of cells that we happened to name head for some reason' thing came up due to some kind of mandate to not explicitly contradict the game and the implication that Jenova's head had been destroyed or something else, I don't know, but it's an ass-covering excuse.
Vincent and Cloud are interrupted by Marlene - since the Remnants were busy fighting Cloud and the Sephirothed children don't seem to have a lot of autonomy, she was able to escape. She hugs Cloud and asks to call Tifa; Cloud realizes that he dropped his phone.
Then, in what took me a moment to realize was a gag and is actually pretty funny, Marlene turns around to look at Vincent, and points to the keychain hanging from Vincent's hip, asking 'May I?' at which point Vincent dramatically opens his coat to reveal that this keychain is, in fact, hanging from a gun, and Marlene asks outraged "You don't have a phone!?"
Vincent is at his best when being made fun of. Even if that mockery is also a form of product placement. Cloud tries to foist Marlene onto Vincent while he goes back to deal with Shinra now that he know they have the head, Marlene gets mad at him for always skipping out on family, and then we flash back to earlier in the night, when Cloud and Tifa were arguing.
This is the bit where Cloud and Tifa get a divorce.
No, not really, but - look, there's nothing wrong with having conflict rock an established relationship between characters, but this scene is trying to walk back the relationship. Tifa in it as amazing lines like "I guess [helping each other] only works for real families," or this whole small rant which would be an amazing armor-piercing diatribe at the Cloud of the first two acts of FF7:
"Look at you! You think you've got it so damn hard. Well, you hate being alone, so let people in! Sure, you might not answer the phone… But I don't see you throwing it away either!" Damn! Cloud sure could have used those words somewhere circa anywhere before the Lifestream sequence with Tifa.
But it's all okay, you see, because Cloud blames himself for Aerith's death, and thinks he's going to die because of the stigma, so it's okay for him to push everyone away so he can die alone and miserable with his guilt. We introduced new plot points so that it would make sense that Cloud would fall back into his old characterization. And it's true that, in real life, people often struggle with not falling back into their old patterns of habit, even after they've had an epiphany and made effort to work on themselves. But here, it's transparently used to create a character reset so the audience has "the Cloud they remember."
Anyway, Cloud asks Vincent if sins can ever be forgiven, Vincent says he never tried, and Cloud says he will try then phone Vincent the verdict, which is a sweet character beat for the two to share, until you remember that Vincent doesn't have a phone, at which point it also becomes a gag.
Then we get a long shot of Cloud's phone sinking into the water which is a direct visual parallel to Aerith's White Materia doing the same in around the same place, and during which we get to hear all the voice mail left by the cast of the game trying to reach out to Cloud.
Including a goddamned Ghost Mail from Aerith, I shit you not.
I will say this: I respect a writer who is able to turn blatant, overenthusiastic product placement into an actual thematic statement in the story. Is Cloud's prominent phone displayed multiple times and shown here still working underwater blatant product placement for Panasonic? Yes. Is it also a visual metaphor in which the phone stands in for our ability to connect with people, Cloud refusing to listen to his voice mails represents him shutting out everyone else, and the mails heard here represent the fact that everyone's been trying to reach out to him all this time? Of course. Is Vincent not having a phone a metaphor for his own broody loneliness and struggle to connect in which he represents Cloud's "failure state" that Cloud is trying to avoid? Obviously. Is it also a very funny gag that doubles as an ad saying "don't be like that guy, get a cell phone"? You betcha.
The FF7AC writers aren't unskilled. This is still the same FF7 team with years of experience. They still have the talent.
It's just that for the most part… They're phoning it in.
No, I won't apologize.
Back at Midgar, Yazoo and Loz have pulled the Sephirothed children around the Meteorfall monument. Why? Well, they're still trying to find Jenova's head, and they got it into their heads that it's somehow hidden under the monument, because it was built by Shinra (wait, a minute, they let Shinra - you know what, we're past that now). They're still operating pretty much on pure vibes and bumblefucking into a place or after a person and going "Jenova is here I'm sure of it!" Or, to put it another way, the plot is motivated by them being stupid and not knowing where to go next, so they just wander somewhere and cause trouble.
The crowd is gathered to ask what they've done with the children, and as they get worked up, Yazoo summons some of the shadow-beasts to rampage through the crowd, which leaves them free to start tugging on the monument's chains to try and bring it down and reveal the Jenova cache they assume is there.
Luckily(???) the Turks are there! They're not going to be much help, but they're around. And by "not much help," I mean that Reno scoffs at the idea that they hid Jenova's head under the statue and say instead that 'where we hid it is classified info', immediately confirming to the Remnants that they do have the head and know where it's located, at which point Reno blames Rude for spilling the beans. Rude hasn't had a single spoken line since he arrived on the scene. It's pretty funny. That movie honestly has decent comedy sense. Then the Turks and the Remnants go to blows.
Slightly more helpfully, Tifa is also here; she locates Denzel and starts trying to shake him out of his trance. No luck so far.
While all this is going on, Cloud brings Marlene home, which is very funny, because he meant to bring her someplace she'll be safe while he goes back on the hunt but what he did was bring her straight to the location of a Remnant monster attack. They have an exchange in which they talk about Cloud's search for a cure and why he had to leave, and Marlene says "How are you supposed to look after your family if you can't even look after yourself" while doing a gun-arm pose, 'or at least Daddy says so.' This is Marlene's only acknowledgement of her father's existence in this film. Cloud replies everyone has been taking care of him, and now it's time for him to take care of them in turn, so I guess character growth is happening again?
Rufus and Kadaj are both on a construction site overlooking the city, continuing to do their Hannibal Lecter/Will Gramah routine pontificating about their motives and the nature of history and repetition. Rufus prods Kadaj about his motive - what did he mean when he said he needed Jenova's cells to be 'whole again'?
Kadaj explains, with notable frustration, that he means Sephiroth is coming back. Even though he's never known Sephiroth in his short existence, Kadaj knows all this is part of some ploy for him to be reborn. He resents this; he resents being an incomplete replacement for someone his Mother loves more than him, destined to be subsumed into his rebirth. But it's his Mother's will, so he'll do it.
It's an interesting wrinkle of something approaching character depth for Kadaj, which I appreciate. It also brings into new relief the whole 'who is in charge' question, but only briefly. For the most part this movie lands squarely on 'Sephiroth is the motive force behind everything.' Sephiroth instrumentalized his own love for Jenova in the creation of Kadaj, and Kadaj is acting out of devotion to his Mother, but Jenova isn't really there anymore; ultimately he will fulfill her wishes by bringing back Sephiroth, who is true bearer of her legacy.
It's as good an answer as any to the whole dilemma, I suppose. It helps sell Kadaj as this helpless puppet of someone else's goals, someone who has more self-awareness of his condition than pre-Northern Crater Cloud did, yet even less agency in acting against it.
In the knowledge that they couldn't come up with a villain who would outshine what Sephiroth has become in the popular consciousness, they instead came up with a villain whose entire deal is that he knows he is an inferior version of Sephiroth and resents it, a character whose main point of internal conflict is that he knows he's just the build-up to the character appearance the viewer is actually here for.
It's clever, I'll give it that. Self-indulgent, but clever.
Don't feel too sad about Kadaj though, he's about to do a cheeky spot of mass murder.
He summons Bahamut.
Specifically, Bahamut-SIN, a whole new version of Bahamut, presumably even more powerful than the others. However, he also does so using a BLUE Materia, not Red! 0/10 instant failure, worst movie of all time.
Bahamut's summoning immediately causes havoc. The fight between Turks and Remnants is interrupted as a terrified Reno and Rude run away, both of them grabing Sephirothed children under their arms to get them out of the way. Tifa tries to shelter Denzel from the beast. The crowd is running in, huh, slightly more panic than before? The monsters were already causing chaos. The Remnants move away from the Meteorfall monument, and Bahamut blows it up.
This of course fails to achieve anything, as Jenova's head wasn't hidden underneath (go figure), so Bahamut goes on to just wreak general havoc.
This kicks off the longest action sequence so far, and what was pretty clearly designed as one of the movie's highlights. It kinda lands flat for me for reasons I'll explain, but it's very pretty. One component of it is a Rude/Reno tag team match against Loz/Yazoo, which is both pretty cool and pretty funny (as usual with the Turks it's kind of a slapstick comedy fight), introducing Rude's iconic move of 'getting his sunglasses broken and immediately whipping out a pair of replacement sunglasses he always carries with him).
Fight Scene Rating: 3.5/5, Decent comedy and action but doesn't bring the house down.
And this, I think, is going to be our cutoff point for the day - say thanks to the Turk, who provided us a nice breezy slapstick fight as a break before we start with Bahamut-SIN in earnest, and with it, the extended series of actions sequences that constitutes the back half of the movie.
We are here at the 1h11m mark. The movie is technically 2h06m long, but the credits hit at 1h55m, so we've covered just under two thirds of the movie. I still ended up writing more total words for that last third, partly because it concentrates the climax and most of the action of the film, and partly because fatigue and writing too much in a row probably caused me to devolve into stream of consciousness rambling. You'll have to bear with it.
Okay, so, on top of all the "Why is everyone letting Shinra just keep on being a megacorp which owns the planet after having been the primary reason it nearly got destroyed" stuff, I'd like to direct your attention to this screencap here:
Ah, yes. Shinra. Shinra was definitely fighting against Sephiroth and this nebulous "them," presumably the same army of minions FF7 proper suddenly decided to claim he had right at the very end. They definitely did not do anything such as "fight to the death to prevent Cloud and co. from stopping Hojo using Sister Ray to supercharge Sephiroth" or "let Hojo, a man who explicitly wanted Reunion to happen, stay in charge of their Science division even after he went on a triumphant rant about how ecstatic he was that Sephiroth was going to destroy the world," and most certainly weren't spending most of the entire game as enemies even before that.
I like to consider the Tifa vs Sephi-bro fight to be one of those boss fights where you win and then the cutscene after shows you losing, what with the victory fanfare showing that the hypothetical player won the boss fight.
Also, the sequence didn't just blow Monty Oum's mind. FF7 Remake (and other games) would go out of their way to try to make their gameplay feel like the fight scenes from this movie as much as they could going forward.
