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Four years ago, video game maker Square created a feature film called Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. It was the first real attempt by anyone to create an entirely computer generated movie and make it look photo realistic. Square formed a movie studio called Square Pictures and poured in hundreds of millions of dollars to create the visual masterpiece. Unfortunately, the movie failed in theaters and the company was in danger. Many say the failure was due to a bland story line, or the departure from the fantasy setting for science fiction, or just simply not being animated enough. Square Pictures was shut down shortly after completing their work on the Animatrix short, Final Flight of the Osiris. Years later Square has recovered with successful releases and a merger with another game company Enix. Now, years after their previous blunder and with the momentum of recent success, Square Enix has released another feature film. This time directly tied to a video game, Final Fantasy VII.

One of the problems of Spirits Within was the characters were too wooden. Even though they looked ultra realistic in still shots, when they moved it was too stiff. This may not make any sense as they motion captured every character movement, but that’s just how it appeared. When creating characters with that much realism, there are certain nuances like skin and hair that don’t move realistically enough to imitate real life. For Advent Children, the style is a lot less “real”, meaning it isn’t aiming to be photo realistic, but at the same time, they are more “real” as characters. Allowing for hand animated facial expressions, they can be exaggerated just a tad from real life, and on the screen it’s more believable.

The story takes place a few years after the game leaves off. In fact, the very first scene of the movie is the very last scene of the game, with Red XIII climbing a cliffside overlooking Midgard. Without giving away too much of the plot, it’s basically a group of guys that have a direct link to Jenova trying to recover her to start some bad times, while Cloud and friends stop them. Of course, if you’ve never played the game, you have no idea what I’m talking about. That’s understandable, because that is probably how you will feel about most of the movie. The movie begins with a little summary of the plot of the game, but it really isn’t enough to understand it all. It’s enough to make sense of what the people are doing in the movie, but many questions will arise. The movie doesn’t go into detail about who most of the characters are and what they are. At one point of the movie, all the bizarre characters just show up for a battle, and most common folk will be confused. But if you’ve played the game and enjoyed it, you will enjoy the movie immensely.

For those non-Final Fantasy aficionados, I still recommend watching it because it’s really visually stunning and quite entertaining even if you don’t know who all these people are and the things they mention. The action sequences are amazing, but please realize this is based on a video game in a fantasy world. You have to suspend some logic as the characters often defy all rules of nature. If you enjoy those CG cut scenes in video games that you play through to see, then you will certainly enjoy this marvel. You can think of it as an hour and 45 minute CG cut scene. However, it’s understandable that they did not release this in theaters here, as it does not work at all as a stand alone feature. I was able to acquire the movie early through torrents and fansubs, but you can wait until November for the official US release on DVD and PSP formats if you choose to. I will be buying the DVD once it is released.