Advent Children: Bad?
There have been alot of complaint posts about this movie, and I must warn you that this is no exception. Thus, it is going behind a cut.

First of all, to dispel any misconceptions right here and now, I liked the movie. The fight scenes were very well done. The first thirty seconds had me in tears with all the nostalgia and music and accuracy of the movements. I liked it enough to watch it again.

And now onto what I really thought of the movie.

A quick note before I begin, I didn't appreciate the bringing back of dead characters with little or no explaination: Rufus, Tseng, Sephiroth and Jenova.
Was it just me, or did some of the characters look wrong? As in, Red XIII's neck was a little too short, and Barret's gun-arm started too high up on his forearm. Cid looked too young. Tifa's breasts were... they didn't look quite right, too close to her neck. And Cloud's hair was considerably more Tidus-like. In the latest sketches of DoC, they have anime portrayals of all the characters in their updated looks. Cloud's hair just isn't spiky enough, at best it looks like bedhead. Personally, I don't think the animation has improved much since The Spirits Within.
And it might have just been me, but I really missed Mog. I mean, Cait Sith is annoying enough as it is, and I think that he should have been replaced with Reeve as soon as you figure out who he really is. But to put the robot cat ontop of Nanaki's head? It brings Nanaki's coolness factor down a few points, because every time the beast does a daring leap onto a monster, you hear Cait Sith's annoying "WhooAoAoAoA!"
Which brings me to another irk of the movie which is the slapstick comedy fightscenes, in particular, the fight between the trio and the Turks.
The Turks are not as useless as they seem in AC. Rude threw a knife into Don Corneo's back from thirty feet away. Tseng and Elena mastered the Temple of the Ancients puzzles in half the time it took AVALANCHE to. Reno is about as bumbling, but he handles it way better in the game. The scene with the church flowerbed comes to mind.
In the movie, the Turks start out being as cool as before (didn't Tseng die at the Temple of the Ancients?) at Healin, it was pretty accurate, as well as Rufus' attempted speech and Cloud's impatience. That was a nice scene. But as soon as the fighting begins, the motion capturing is OBVIOUSLY on fast foward as Reno climbs a tower in three seconds, and they get their asses kicked by Loz and Yazoo, who, let's face it, aren't nearly as challenging as the monsters in the Gelnika, who they had no trouble getting by.
And when Bahamut shows up (I'm guessing this is a new form of the dragon king, as he doesn't come close to resembling any of the ones from the game *headdesk*) Reno smacks Rude in the head with his Electro-Mag rod.
Excuse me? They're partners, they have been working together for years, that just wouldn't happen!

And now we get to the PCs. I'll leave Cloud for last and start with Yuffie. Yuffie Kisaragi, the only character who had a plan for what to do when they beat Sephiroth. The deal was, once Sephiroth was destroyed, and The Planet saved, she would steal their materia, and you were okay knowing that, because hey, who needs Materia once the Planet is rid of all evil (the sequel in and of itself answers the question of 'are we naturally evil' which was the whole point of the ending, and the games popularity, which was why I was opposed to the compilation in the first place, but let's say, for the sake of argument, that we are inherantly good and humanity survives).
So what happens to Yuffie? She goes back to Wutai. That's it.
Hold on, Wutai is one of the only towns where things don't get resolved! North Corel and Fort Condor are either destroyed or saved, Nibelheim is a Shinra puppet show, probably disbanded after the company's fall. We're assuming that all of Shinra's regime is crumbled, and that the good and righteous peasants create new kingdoms etc.
Now we get to Wutai, which wasn't controlled by Shinra at all, but instead was left in the wake of the Mako war, as the only city left on the island. Turned into a resort, a circus. As the wide-range knowledge and use of Materia spread, Wutai's supply ran short, and the people in it were sitting there, dishonored.
This is why we forgive Yuffie and almost want to give her our Materia, once we're done with it. So why then, doesn't that happen? Why is all of the Materia in a box and not evenly distributed among the Wutaians? Why does Yuffie travel around with Cid in the Shera, ready to parachute down when her friends need her the most?
Cid Highwind married Shera, which I was very happy about, and he even named the new ship after her (this is the same ship that exploded out of the Highwind in the final FMV, I'm assuming?). Not much is wrong about Cid, aside from the fact that he had no character at all. He didn't fall asleep during the explainations, he didn't swear, he wasn't as warmhearted, nor was he brash and cynical. But these things I can overlook, because he was barely in the movie, and that part bugs me the most, as he is, in my opinion, the alpha and omega of Cids.
Barret Wallace. First of all, the cornrows. Why?
Secondly, why wasn't he with Marlene? This is one of the two character rapings that just made me cringe.
The WHOLE POINT OF BARRET IS THAT HE IS DOING EVERYTHING FOR MARLENE! So why, then, after he doesn't have to fight anymore, does he leave her in an orphanage and go off doing oil mining? Oil is ALSO the lifeblood of the planet! Barret is a coal miner, it's in his blood, it was always in his blood, it harms no one and is a proven source of energy! Why then, does he go bananas over oil fields and forget all about his daughter?!
Where was Dyne's amulet? The amulet that belonged to Eleanor? Where in the hell was it? Marlene wasn't wearing it, Barret didn't have it. What happened to it? In Final Fantasy VII, Barret was teetering on the edge of being two dimensional, but it was his struggle as a father that made him as real as any person. In Advent Children, they take that away so that he becomes two dimensional. Not only that, his brash insults and bad metaphors are gone too, which makes him even less of the character I spent over 80 hours getting to know!
Okay, must calm down. AC Barret just makes me really mad. Let's move on to someone who hasn't changed much.
Cait Sith. Still a coward, still pretty much useless, and still annoying. Reeve didn't make an appearance, but the movie can't be perfect.
Phew, much better.
Tifa Lockheart now. Tifa has rebuilt Seventh Heaven on the fringes of Midgar. This I understand, she is strong and resiliant. She is also consumed by her love for Cloud, still unreturned even after their intimate mind-melding in the Lifestream and that steamy night on the rocks at the end of Disc II. I guess she's accepted it, because the Chocobo head obsessed over Aeris even until the final moments of the game and two years later, well that takes a number on someone.
But taking care of orphans? Just because she has giant mammories, doesn't mean she's the motherly type. In fact, in the game it proves she has little skill in taking care of the young ("Marlene, watch the bar while we're gone..."). Running an orphanage isn't what I imagined she'd be doing.
Vincent has been up to more adventures, so once DoC comes out maybe there's an explaination about his change of character. The main thing about Vincent is, his entire quest was the atone for his sins. For the first half of his adventure in FFVII, he just wanted to go back to sleep, but he realized, as they continued, that perhaps sins can be forgiven, and not just punished. Then, he kills Hojo and Sephiroth, and feels the warm glowy-glow of redemption (right before the human race is wiped clean off the face of the Earth, but that's just a theory).
So why, then, when he is asked if sins can be forgiven, he responds with "I've never tried it."
I'm sorry, I thought he was the expert on that sort of thing.
Nanaki had one line, and apparently it was some famous guy or something, so I'm just going to write that off. Aside from his short neck-itis, he was pretty well done, with the jumping and biting and clawing and stuff.

There's a reason I left Cloud for last.
There is a moment on the Shinra No. 26, and in that moment it completely summed up Cloud's change in the game. If you recall, at the beginning of the game he has a real chip on his shoulder. But here, in space, Cid is stuck underneath Oxygen Tank 8, the metal piercing through his leg and attaching him to the grated walkway. Cloud and [other party member] try to lift it, and Cid tells them to leave before it's too late.
Cloud, in a text box that is frequently overlooked, says "I'm not leaving without my friends."
Two years later, has anything stayed that way? Or has he gone back to the days of "Don't get me wrong, I don't care about AVALANCHE or the Planet, either!"
Let's talk about storytelling for a moment. What is the hero's journey? What was the point of having Cloud as a main character? Now that we know that he is simply going to go back to normal, do we really care about what happens to him in the meanwhile?
The point of a good story is that the character doesn't go back to normal. Every character has a classic flaw that he/she must overcome in order to face the trials and challenges set out for them by the story (something else the movie lacked was a story).
In Advent Children, the basic message I got from the character of Cloud was "Okay, he did all that stuff with the Planet, and walked the world on foot and made friends of enemies and discovered the meaning of friendship and overcame the Jenova inside of him and his hatred for Sephiroth, as well as his guilt about summoning Meteor and for allowing Aeris to die. (If I recall, by the end of the game he understood why Aeris had to die and that was to save the planet, even if Holy "had the opposite effect" and instead wiped out humanity, but if that were the case the sequel itself would not exist.) The entire point of having Cloud Strife as the hero is that he is the one that changes the most, and for the better."
And now, where is he? He's a lone wolf, with new shoulder armor to visually represent that. He seems more like Squall at the beginning of Final Fantasy VIII, as the quiet, unfriendly emo kid who says "Whatever" all the time. In AC, Cloud blames himself even MORE for Aeris' death, because Sephiroth is no longer around to blame. He is suffering from GeoStigma, which is sort of the aftermath of the Jenova inside of him (which explains why Rufus has it) despite the fact that they killed Jenova.
This part of the movie I really liked, because it explained why the Ancients only sealed Jenova and didn't kill her, because now she's in the Lifstream and fucking up all the kids. It doesn't really matter that the kids are older than two, because let's face it, the plot doesn't make any sense. It just doesn't hold water. And I'm not even approaching the subject of Jenova's fight to stay alive in the first place, because in reality, she can't do shit as a part of the Lifestream, only as an invader of such, while still being a living entity, albeit an alien from outer space. She didn't want to be killed, because when she is dead, she is useless. This is why the plot of AC sucks. Jenova is dead and she has no power.

If I recall, the Reunion already happened. All of the Jenova cells, including the ones inside Hojo and Cloud, came together in the Crater and summoned Meteor. After that, Jenova's parts synthesized and became the final Jenova that you fight, which I'm assuming is her true form. There are some plot holes in the game as well, Lucrecia, for instance, and the fact that Jenova cells stayed with Hojo but not with Cloud, as he was able to overcome her power and defeat Sephiroth's final form, a battle that takes place inside Cloud's mind.
And it was because of the reunion and the extraction of Jenova that Cloud was finally able to win the battle over his body with Sephiroth, and prevent Sephiroth from returning EVER again.

And then he returns, for NO GOOD REASON. We saw it coming, because Sephiroth was one of, if not the coolest and scariest villain(s) of all time. And seeing Sephiroth and Cloud fight atop Shinra HQ was actually something I was hoping for even as I played the game all those years ago. That made me quite happy, but while it was happening, the whole fact that it was horribly, horribly wrong prevented me from enjoying the fights to their fullest.

I've seen fanfictions that more accurately depicted the characters, than this "Official Sequel." It was rushed together by Nomura, without Sakaguchi, and the project has suffered much because of it.
If you don't plan on playing the game, and want to see wicked fight scenes, please watch this. If you have played the game, watch it if you like, but expect to be disappointed. And if you plan on playing the game after watching, PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF JENOVA DON'T!!!


Man, I tore it apart! X-Posted on mr_ite