Posted January 01, 2009
After seeing Alone in the Dark, I think I'll skip House of the Dead :)
Anyway... so far we've entirely left out the Final Fantasy movies. Two totally different movies:
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within: a loosely on the Final Fantasy universe (as far as one exists) based scifi CG movie, in which earth is attacked by strange phantoms.
The two big problems with this movie were that it tried to push realistic CG animation and that it used a few too many asian culture themes for western audiences.
Realistic graphics are still very hard to do and even today, most movies try to avoid the realistic look if at all possible. Final Fantasy tried and the outcome was amazing (this was 2001!), but not quite photo-realistic. Back then CG wasn't mainstream yet and people had trouble accepting the CG characters and their complex emotions.
The other problem was the Asian heritage. Stories of ghosts, planetary forces and so on may be easy to swallow for a Japanese audience, but western people get pretty irritated as such beliefs have not been part of our culture for almost 2000 years. Also, there are just certain (western) story-requirements that the movie doesn't follow:
1. There has to be a bad guy
2. The heroes always live.
An indicator was when I went to see the movie and during the last scene where a platform brings Aki up to the planet surface, holding a lifeless Grey in her arms, I heard two people whisper: "He's not dead, is he?" - "No, of course not!"
Yes, he was dead. He died in the previous scene, but still those people expected him to stand up. And in a western movie, he would have...
However, if you are willing to accept the CG characters and sometimes strange storylines, you'll find a very enjoyable movie.
Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children on the other hand is a direct movie conversion of the Final Fantasy 7 universe. This one doesn't try to be realistic (although the animation style itself is far from cartoonish) and the story is kept to a minimum. However it suffers from a bad English translation and it requires you to actually know Final Fantasy 7 to fully appreciate it.
At it's heart, FF7AC focuses more on over the top fight scenes than on anything else. And that's really all there is to it: If you love the fights, you'll like the movie. Otherwise, you won't.
Anyway... so far we've entirely left out the Final Fantasy movies. Two totally different movies:
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within: a loosely on the Final Fantasy universe (as far as one exists) based scifi CG movie, in which earth is attacked by strange phantoms.
The two big problems with this movie were that it tried to push realistic CG animation and that it used a few too many asian culture themes for western audiences.
Realistic graphics are still very hard to do and even today, most movies try to avoid the realistic look if at all possible. Final Fantasy tried and the outcome was amazing (this was 2001!), but not quite photo-realistic. Back then CG wasn't mainstream yet and people had trouble accepting the CG characters and their complex emotions.
The other problem was the Asian heritage. Stories of ghosts, planetary forces and so on may be easy to swallow for a Japanese audience, but western people get pretty irritated as such beliefs have not been part of our culture for almost 2000 years. Also, there are just certain (western) story-requirements that the movie doesn't follow:
1. There has to be a bad guy
2. The heroes always live.
An indicator was when I went to see the movie and during the last scene where a platform brings Aki up to the planet surface, holding a lifeless Grey in her arms, I heard two people whisper: "He's not dead, is he?" - "No, of course not!"
Yes, he was dead. He died in the previous scene, but still those people expected him to stand up. And in a western movie, he would have...
However, if you are willing to accept the CG characters and sometimes strange storylines, you'll find a very enjoyable movie.
Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children on the other hand is a direct movie conversion of the Final Fantasy 7 universe. This one doesn't try to be realistic (although the animation style itself is far from cartoonish) and the story is kept to a minimum. However it suffers from a bad English translation and it requires you to actually know Final Fantasy 7 to fully appreciate it.
At it's heart, FF7AC focuses more on over the top fight scenes than on anything else. And that's really all there is to it: If you love the fights, you'll like the movie. Otherwise, you won't.