Voice cast (English): Steve Burton, Rachael Leigh Cook, and Steve
Staley
Directors: Tetsuya Nomura and Takeshi Nozue
126 minutes (12) 2009
Sony 4K Ultra HD
Rating: 7/10
Review by Christopher Geary
This genre picture is entirely unreal. It was
state-of-the-art digital animation for the year it was first produced and, even
putting its fantasy content aside, it’s impossible to review this kind of movie
fairly without commenting upon the visuals and the medium they were created in.
Said images frequently achieve surprising degrees of photo-realism, with skin (though,
admittedly, too free of random blemishes for convincing people) and eyes being
presented with quite impressive clarity, opacity, reflectivity, and luminosity.
Hardware is particularly well served, throughout, whether tangled detailing on
stained or dusty ruins, or the appealing lustre of shiny futuristic machines.
Textiles are imperfectly rendered but less attention is given to drapes and looser
clothing (patterned after top designers?) than is awarded to flesh and muscle
tones.
Sadly, voice-actors (whether they speak Japanese or
English) sometimes fail to properly sell an emotive or sympathetic performance
by the animated characters half as well as relevant sound effects help convince
viewers that splashes in pools and puddles, or the random noise of rainy
weather are entirely natural and synchronous with environments. Of course,
decades of exposure to audio tracks generated entirely by sound design, and the
remarkable work of Foley artists, ensures that a majority of viewers should
have few problems in accepting digitally-generated backgrounds as location
settings for unfolding dramas, but - for these animated characters - there
remains the viewing problem of the ‘uncanny valley’.
Somewhat perversely, the harder that such 3D anime
strives to produce any believable human figures and faces, the more that - even
unskilled - viewers might unconsciously ‘reject’ the delicate balancing act of
creativity and software which blatantly attempts to accurately imitate life.
When such presentations approach perfection, their tinniest flaws simply loom
ever larger than life itself. Discernable ‘imperfections’ in this illusion of
life are not to be confused with commonplace human faults. They are, instead,
entirely the flaws of something inhuman, and their manufactured state is always
readily apparent no matter what the context, so any illusion of life here
remains only partial and viewers are likely to instinctively disengage from the
drama.
As ever with such genre productions, the biggest single
flaw in the filmic narrative is not the presence of hackneyed dialogue or lack
of believability for some fantastic aspects, but the movements and placement of
virtual cameras. Simply put, there is just far too much ultra-fast cutting from
one angle to another, and jittery whizzing about in midair, or swirling around
in circles (that on a real film set would expose the ‘fourth wall’), and this
amounts to a rather childish misuse of the possibilities available for such animation.
Virtual cameras unwittingly compromise the - sometimes passable - test of basic
physics within portraits of imaginary worlds.
It does not help matters that the main plot
is wholly incomprehensible. Viewer might struggle to make sense of mystic nonsense
crashing into explorations of otherworldly SF themes, such as the ‘geo-stigma’
disease that’s somehow being passed onto humans by the ailing planet. Visually,
if not quite thematically, the influence of The
Matrix films is evident in fighting scenes, where both the sword-play
heroes (how do the spindly-limbed youngsters wield unfeasibly over-sized weapons?)
and unarmed combatants lurch across the screen with gravity-defying leaps over
tall buildings, and rather wretchedly silly notions of boot-strap help-mates
who each hurl the hero upwards, like throwing a relay-race baton flung up the
side of a skyscraper.
Nevertheless, this newly revised 4K edition is the director’s
cut of the 2005 animated movie (100 minutes, cert. PG), and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete
is hugely enjoyable, if you can overlook the amusingly ridiculous character names,
like Cloud and Rude, and your appreciation of genre action cinema is not
hindered by much intolerance for the confusing absurdities of variously convoluted
and lengthy 3D-cartoon sequences. The planet’s mythic Life-stream infecting
humans with geo-stigma disease as the central problem is a worthy ecological
metaphor (a witty riff on the Gaia hypothesis) and it means the plot seems less vital
to anime movies like this. FF7:ACC is
best viewed as a collection of action sequences and visual poetry - like visionary
vignettes of digital art - on SF themes of survival. Its fantastical artistic qualities and
stunning exercises in stylish photo-real animation are of much greater
importance than story-telling and genre-narrative concerns. Most effective as an
expression of artistry inspired by the possibilities and impressions from
game-play in an extraordinary fairy-tale franchise, this is basically an
atypical sci-fi movie. Although it delivers frequently astonishing images of post-industrial
city-scape and giant monster-fighting in a dystopian world, it hardly matters
that many scenes defy the natural physics of motion and gravity, because it's the hyper-kinetics
of super-hero traditions that are most clearly being respected here, not any conventional reality.
Magically fabulous, this movie boasts PRA (photo-real
animation) of superior quality than 3D-styled ‘Hypermarionation’ for Gerry
Anderson’s TV series New Captain Scarlet
(2005). Despite its complete lack of actors on-screen, there’s more genuinely
imaginative artistry here than can be found in Disney’s techno-fetishistic TRON: Legacy (2010), although that was
more about quest gamers and explanatory narrative than this. FF7:ACC was followed by Takeshi Nozue’s
equally impressive Kingsglaive: Final
Fantasy XV (2016).
