WARNING: Post may contain spoilers for Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children

Last night I watched Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children while long-distance phone conferencing with the only person qualified to share such an experience with me...Aerosaucer, who has his own review of the experience on his blog. He found the entire adventure to be orgasmically transcendent, and, while I could never equal his amazing fanboydom, I also must strongly encourage everybody to screen Advent Children. Preferably in the original Japanese--with English subtitles, of course--so you can appreciate how mind-bendingly well the mouth movements match the voices.

However, I also felt there were several potential points of improvement for the film, and I am a strong believer in giving honest constructive criticism.

• For one thing, the plot would have been improved by 100-fold if the army of creepy snake-eyed children had been equipped with giant gun/swords (a Final Fantasy staple) and set loose to rampage across the half-ruined metropolis. Sure, little children are terrifying in their own right, but add some comic book weaponry and you've got yourself a serious party.


• I felt that Cloud's climactic self-realization moment was poorly scripted. Instead of delivering the powerful and somewhat poignant line, "There's nothing that's not important," Cloud should have said, "You raise some interesting points, Sephrioth, but this next move of mine is going to be so freaking sweet that it'll make you explode into a flurry of bird feathers."


• Cloud's CutCo Knifematic 2000 Motorbike X-treme should have contained a couple more awesomely gigantic swords. As a rule, when you're providing a totally badass mode of transportation for the main character in an anime action flick, the sword-to-rider ratio should never drop below 15:1.


• Finally, the animators could have improved the detail on the characters' skin to the point where you could actually see the microscopic bacteria and follicle structures on the surface. I mean, sure you can't perceive that level of detail in real life, but they already made the rest of it so hyper-realistic that my retinas hurt...why settle for the poor resolution of actual human vision, when CGI can improve on our wimpy biological sensory abilities?
  

Seriously, though, this was a really gorgeous piece of work and I strongly recommend it. To get the full effect, if you haven't played FF7 the game then you should probably read a FF7 plot summary before trying to watch the movie. Well, actually, if you haven't played FF7 then you should go spend an hour in your Shame Closet, because it is one of the greatest of the videogame classics.