To be completely honest and straight to the point, this CG-animated adaptation is an absolute chore to sit through, weighed down by its own excess and its attempt to do more than it clearly can not do. Clocking in at over two hours, the creators miraculously fail to explain any of the gratuitous visuals or the characters, assuming the audience simply knows. For those unfamiliar with the video game series on which it is based, the story is needlessly and ridiculously complicated, taking place years after some mysterious event that apparently created a black-ooze disease.
Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell the creators of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, a spectacularly boring and incomprehensible waste of time guaranteed to put viewers to sleep. This is true also of the grand, sweeping epics, such as Lawrence of Arabia or Lord of the Rings, and the elaborately complex sci-fi adventures, like Andrei Tarkovsky's Solarisor The Matrix. The plot centers around a single, well-understood idea motivating all the action and the characters involved. The best and most memorable movies have one thing in common.
