Saturday, December 10, 2011

Revisiting the Reunion

People use the phrase love-hate relationship a lot—I do too—but it was a long time before I ever really understood what it meant to love something but also hate it at the same time. I usually feel a single way about a thing, or if the feeling is mixed, it usually isn’t a mix of polar opposites. But here we are with Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. It’s not so much that I love it and hate it both at once, but that there are things about it, taken separately, that I love and hate (very little falls in between) and so when the whole is taken together, I can’t determine an overall positive or negative feeling. It is a completely null value, nearly impossible to judge.

This may have something to do with why I haven’t watched it in nearly five years.

The last time I can distinctly recall watching this movie would be the night before my friend Steve and I drove to Otakon in 2006. So, you know. Kind of a while.

I watched it again tonight (along with the short OVA Last Order: Final Fantasy VII) because I’ve been just generally in a Final Fantasy VII frame of mind lately, I’m not sure I want to tackle a 40-odd hour game right now, but I did have at least a couple of hours to kill. The movie doesn’t seem to take a couple of hours, but it is in fact nearly that long. It probably seems less so because it’s really so much eye-candy, with the plot (such as it is) packed into the beginning and the best parts of the action comprising pretty much the final half.

It’s not heavy viewing, is what I’m saying.

I love Advent Children because it is a return to a world and a group of people who I spent a lot of time with. The thing about a role-playing game (a lot of games do this, but role-playing games are best at it because they are longer and you have more control over things) is that you get close to the characters. This doesn’t happen the way it does in a movie, or in a book, where you are shown the characters. It happens in only the way that video games can allow, by letting you be the people in question. This is a fundamentally deeper level of involvement in a narrative. Regardless of the level of skill with which it is handled, the potential is greater.

Of course, we as players don’t really control the plot of the game (and Final Fantasy VII has at least one moment that uses this fact pretty brilliantly, to good narrative effect). In a narrative of as grand a design (in intent if not in actual outcome) as Final Fantasy VII’s, there is no altering the story, or the dialogue; we do not control how the characters develop. But we do provide the will, the motive force, that keeps them going. We are what takes them from one event to the next, one crisis to the next, and on to the ultimate resolution. Occasionally we are asked to be the mind for the characters, solving their problems. There is only one solution, but we are the ones who have to help them find it. This tends to skew our thoughts in favor of the characters, because the characters are in fact, at least in part, us.

I say this so that you will understand why I loved these characters so much, despite the fact that, viewed objectively, the plot and character development of the game falls pretty squarely into the “Could Definitely Use Some Work” category.

The creators of this movie even appear to acknowledge that they are trading on this feeling, considering they open Advent Children with these lines:

“To those who loved this world, and knew friendly company within. This Reunion is for you.”

And I have to tell you, that trading on our familiarity, our nostalgia for this movie? It works. There is a scene toward the end of the movie, where one by one the party from the game comes together again to join the fight. I get pretty choked up by it every time I watch it. You see, I am a tremendous nerd.

So this is the initial positive: a fond return to a known setting and well-loved characters, with whom I already have a deep connection.

This helps soften the blow of the major negative of the movie which, though it has a few different manifestations, is nevertheless at its heart one overarching problem. Namely, that this movie is dumb.

So very, very fucking dumb.

Now, normally I don’t demand that every movie be an aggressively mind-expanding experience, full of deep wisdom and profound insights into the nature and inner workings of life, the universe and everything. That’s nice, don’t get me wrong, and always to be lauded and applauded. But sometimes when I’m hungry, I'm just in the mood for dessert, you know?

One thing I constantly gripe about regarding this movie is the way they completely undo all the character development the hero went through in the original game, all so they can do it over again for the movie. My girlfriend rolls her eyes every time I talk about this, but she’s never actually played the game. For her, the movie is just eye-candy. And that’s fine, really. To each their own, and all. But it’s a serious problem to me.

It’s not as if this is the sequel to another movie or something. It’s the sequel to a role-playing game, one that can easily take up 40 hours of your life (or more) if you’re devoted to finding every last mystical doodad and whatsit. The hero’s character is dissected in pretty excruciating detail throughout this process, and the resolution to his personal issues is honestly (if memory serves; it has been about twelve or thirteen years now) pretty well done, and pretty solidly resolved. There isn’t a lot of reason to think he would continue having these problems, or that these old mental and emotional wounds would reopen. If there is a reason, none is given by the movie. Ever. We just see Cloud being cold and withdrawn and mopey again, and the only thing we’re ever told about this is that the losses he (and therefore we) experienced throughout the course of the original game’s narrative, the burden of knowing there were people he couldn’t save, weigh on him. Except this was, again, all part of what Cloud had to resolve once he confronted the truth about who he really was toward the latter half of the original game (it’s too long and complicated to explain here).

Part of me doesn’t understand why they would do this. But then, another part of me does. Cloud Strife is a character in Final Fantasy VII, which is not just an RPG. It is the RPG that made RPGs a popular and profitable genre to the West, at least as far as console gamers were concerned, and it was one of the games that helped to forward the notion that games could be storytelling media (there were others before this, but they didn't enjoy Final Fantasy VII's level of market penetration). And so of course when Square Enix decided that, rather than throw their full efforts into a new creative endeavor (said decision likely being partly the result of Final Fantasy XII’s torturous development), they could easily and more profitably revisit previous properties, it suddenly becomes clear exactly why they would do this. There are reasons for Cloud’s character development to be completely undone, it turns out. Millions and millions of reasons, if by reasons you mean dollars.

There is one other problem with the movie, which is that it’s a bit lazy in spots. It pays lip service to the notion of filling in all the newcomers on the story via a large exposition dump. It basically runs as follows:

There was once a powerful warrior named Sephiroth who realized that his existence was the result of a science experiment of the very maddest sort, that he was not in fact strictly human, and that the being from which he was partly derived (again, it’s…complicated. Or at least convoluted) was a space-faring entity that nearly destroyed the world. Feeling wronged by the nature of the very experiment that created him, he decided to follow in the footsteps of the creature that was his genesis and try to destroy the world, too. A group of people who (quite understandably, I think) took issue with this course of action banded together to stop him. Their leader, Cloud, had lost a number of friends and family at Sephiroth’s hands both in the backstory and in the course of the game, and had to recover from the queen bitch of all identity crises in order to get his act together to wipe out the threat that Sephiroth posed.

That’s actually probably clearer and more concise than the way Advent Children gives it to us, really. And that’s actually not so bad. The problem is that despite this, to really get the movie, you have to be pretty familiar with the game. For instance, the church where the disease Geostigma is finally cured is the church where the character Aerith from the game grew her flowers, and some of her healing presence remains there. But the movie never tells you who she is, why some part of her would remain in that church, why she would really be instrumental in healing this particular disease, or any of those other niggling little details. I don’t particularly mind this way of handling the story, considering how unrepentantly for-the-fans this movie makes itself out to be. But then why even bother with the recap at the beginning of the movie at all? If we can remember all the tinier details of the game’s world and setting, surely we can keep the more basic outline of events straight without help.

It’s just half-assed. The time and effort and money spent rendering those scenes might have been better spent explaining to us why Cloud suffered such a major reversion of character.

The last thing I feel obligated to mention is the action scenes. There are a lot of them (they seem to comprise more than half of the movie altogether), and the choreography is quite simply… something. Advent Children has its characters flying all over the place, being tossed several hundred, if not thousands of feet into the air, taking abuse that would kill an average human dozens of times over, cutting motorcycles in half (while airborne, mind you, and also upside down) with swords so large that an actual human being probably could not wield them in any useful way, cutting pieces of buildings apart with said swords… It really has to be seen to be understood. And I’m divided on this. Part of me has trouble reconciling this sort of thing with any serious narrative (and Advent Children, despite appearances, seems very earnest about at least wanting to be a serious narrative). That part of me just wants to stand there and point at the screen and go “Look at this shit. LOOK. At. This. Shit. It is ridiculous.” And then the other part of me just sits there with a big grin on his face, capable of only one vocalization: “WOOOOOOOOO!” Like it was a concert, or some kind of stadium event.

So there you have it, I guess. Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is big and stupid and epic and ridiculous. It’s kind of like a Dragonforce song that way.