"What do you cherish most? Give me the pleasure of taking that away from you . . . "

"You still don't understand anything at all. There's nothing that I don't cherish!" -- Sephiroth and Cloud, during their final confrontation

After the miserable box-office failure of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, it seemed that the future market for computer-generated films based on epic Japanese console RPGs was pretty dim. However, Sony Pictures is apparently not one to let a cash cow sit out to pasture for very long. Going back to what made the Final Fantasy franchise so popular worldwide, they decided to produce a full-length CGI feature based on their first huge hit, Final Fantasy VII for the PlayStation.

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children starts two years after the events of the game. Sephiroth has been defeated, the Lifestream has stopped Meteor from tearing apart the planet, and the good citizens of Midgar are trying to rebuild their lives. Erstwhile hero Cloud Strife has returned to his emo ways, and roams the world as a freelance courier.

His love interest, Tifa Lockheart, runs a combined bar/orphanage (don't ask), taking care of many of the children left parentless after the devastation wrought by the Shinra Corporation and Sephiroth. Unfortunately, many of these orphans (as well as Cloud himself) are afflicted with a strange debilitating disease called Geostigma.

Cloud's mopey existence, and the lives of these infected children, are shaken up with the arrival of three violent, silver-haired prettyboys. These newcomers take an unusual interest in those who suffer from Geostigma, calling the afflicted orphans the "advent children" and referring to Cloud as "big brother". Cloud has to pull himself out of his self-pitying Linkin Park-listening state, facing demons both internal and external, to save the planet from Sephiroth once more.

If none of the names or events described above make any sense to you, don't worry. While Advent Children‘s plot relies heavily on you knowing the characters and backstory from the Final Fantasy VII game, the plot is essentially irrelevant to the movie as a whole. Oh, there are some noises made about the Geostigma and the preserved head of Jenova and Sephiroth's return and Cloud having to man up and fight again, but it's all basically an excuse for a series of jaw-droppingly spectacular action set pieces.

For instance, one of the minor scenes early in the movie has Tifa face off against one of the three prettyboys in the ruins of a church. It starts off with fisticuffs, and soon escalates into a series of midair blocks and stone-shattering throws that makes the fights in the Street Fighter games look like throwdowns between nursing home patients.

It culminates in Tifa being flung into a broken wall thirty feet in the air, landing on it with her feet and flinging herself back at her opponent, all in slow-motion as flower petals stirred up by the sheer air pressure generated by their movements drifting slowly around them both. Then, just when you think it's all over, the bad guy's cell phone rings, and the ringtone will be instantly familiar to fans of the original game. And that's not even the fifth best fight in the movie!

The extras here are good, though not spectacular. The disc with the main feature also contains "Remembrance of Final Fantasy VII", a compilation of various cut scenes and dialogue moments from the original PlayStation game that gives a nice overview of the plot of the game. While it won't help much if you've never played the game, it is a pretty good refresher course for those who haven't touched their old game discs since 1998.

The second disc contains some rather pointless deleted scenes, a shortened version of the movie shown at film festivals, and a really interesting and lengthy feature about the making of Advent Children. Even the dub is pretty good, featuring many of the same voice actors who portrayed those characters in the Kingdom Hearts video game, though there's just something extra melodramatic about the Japanese track that makes it the best choice for this movie.

Advent Children is two hours of insanely cool wuxia action, liberally spiced with emo mysticism. If you like deep, compelling plots and well-defined characters, you probably won't be too enthused after watching this movie.

On the other hand, if you like action sequences that make the Matrix films look like Merchant-Ivory costume melodramas, or if you're into bizarrely baroque sequels to Japanese RPGs, or if you just happen to like angsty prettyboys with Vidal Sassoon hair going at it hammer and tongs, you have to get this DVD. It doesn't get much better than this.