So, Advent Children. Well, Advent Children Complete to be specific. Whichever version you watch, this movie is a sequel to Final Fantasy VII and, all-in-all, it's alright? It's not a particularly messy or surprising movie, and that's maybe it's biggest problem. It's fine. It fits the description of "what if we made a fairly short followup to FF7" and doesn't do much more than that.
One of my biggest issues with the film is that, honestly, I think I wanted more? The stuff it adds is all very forgettable, surface-level stuff and while I understand that following up the original game is hard, this just doesn't live up to the quality of that game. Sure, the writing is fine and everyone's characterization feels in line with the original, but other than having an excuse to see these characters and places again, there isn't much of a reason to watch this. The villains are forgettable because they're somewhat purposefully weak imitations of Sephiroth, and the only other addition is a pretty generic kid.
Now, for some positives. For a film from 2005 that may have, admittedly, been touched up for this rerelease, I think it looked pretty good! Some of the animations around background characters are fairly stilted and the movie overall has some of that late-2000s gray-sludgy-haze to it, but the materials and, like, overall fidelity hold up remarkably well. Maybe I'm just nostalgic for this era of animation but I like the way it looks!
I mentioned this was an excuse to see characters and places from the original, and that's true, but I don't know if it's immediately obvious how cool that is. You get to hear everyone's voices for the first time (I know Kingdom Hearts exists, and maybe there's something else too, but this marked the first time for me). You get to see Midgar (and a few other spots) as fully-3D environments, and there are also a few flashbacks to events depicted (or even just mentioned) in the original game so getting to see those fully-rendered in higher-detail (even 2005-level detail) was sweet. I was constantly going "oh, it's that bit from the game" and, I don't know, that isn't not valuable. Plus it's got more of The Turks. I love the Turks (despite the, you know, unforgivable murders they do).
They also reuse a fair amount of music from the games and I thought that was pretty cool too. Hearing a piano version of the battle-theme during an early fight or the victory-music as someone's ringtone was fun. Yes, it's fanservice, but not all fanservice is bad. What is bad fanservice is bringing back characters who I felt died pretty unambiguously in the original game. There are two supporting characters who show up in this with little more than an "I got better" and it kind of took me out of things (though, upon revisiting footage of the original game, maybe my presumption of one of these deaths was greatly exaggerated).
To be honest, I don't know what I'd want out of a followup to FF7. Ideally I think the only thing that could live up to my expectations would be a similar-scale globetrotting adventure, but a 90-ish minute movie isn't the avenue for that. They did the best they could with the medium they chose for this, I suppose, but I'm mostly just left wishing it was more interesting.
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