This piece was first left as a review on the website RateYourMusic.com I was reviewing Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, the film by Tetsuo Nomura.
I think Advent Children reveals that the artist is more honest when they refuse to attempt to fabricate the experience of being in combat. There is the historical idea of being in a suit of armour with a sword in your hand ready to get slain by Frenchmen, and there are films that involve sword fighting, and the two are necessarily totally divorced from one another. Gritty realist fantasy will always fail to properly immerse because no matter how close to reality the art gets there is a necessary structural barrier to true experience that comes with viewing an object, like a film, as art. Abstraction comes with its own structural barriers but the abstract work normally much more honest about its true purpose. Cloud's sword is SOOOO BIIIIG, right? How does he swing it around so fast?
The Star Wars prequels were criticised for their handling of the lightsaber fights by some because the film makers chose to have the swords weigh as much the light, which eschewed the realism of an actual melee that the original trilogy seemed to gestured toward. The complaint was that the new fights looked flashy but with nothing visceral to ground them. There are three good reasons why in Star Wars: Episode III - Return of the Sith the duel between Anakin and Obi-Wan feels weightless, the first is that their swords are literally made of light. The second is so that the movement of the bodies of the characters, which are ostensibly real things made of flesh that have weight even in universe, can dissolve and become one with their surroundings. The uncanny plastic of the lava and the light beam swords produce an abstract digital picture of swirling colour which we can feel around us as an environment, and for a while the only real things on the screen bleed into that space, rendering them one with the world they live in. Ignoring the silliness of midichlorians, it finally involves the Jedi as people in the divine mysticism of The Force by turning them into spirits.
The third is that it's cool.
Advent Children of course doesn't have anything real in it at all. Even the narrative itself, which was criticised for being full of non-sequiturs and constant hopping through time, makes no concessions to the logic of cause and effect in either the conventional dramatic sense or its real life operation. The only concessions Advent Children makes to anything tangible are its cryptic references to the probably more coherent narrative of the game (which perhaps crucially to my enjoyment of this film I have never played and know little about) and the way it blends so many different settings and tropes from reality and other media together. The stark unreality of every single constituent part of the film is liberating because it lets the things within the frame move at the speed of thought. The sword fights DO feel without stakes, but that isn't a bad thing! There is no palpable scent of sweat and blood and steel in the air, because Tetsuya Nomura is a modern man and he doesn't know what those things smell like. He isn't interested in doing that sort of art. In the same way that Star Wars involved the Jedi into its in-universe mystical backdrop briefly, Advent Children does a decent enough job of executing the tight balancing act of making every aspect of its world feel involved in the mystical Life Stream for its entire run time. The settings happily feel disconnected and lonely in the way that separate video games maps feel from the hub world, the objects that populate the settings are an empty sort of rarefied matter, and even the way Tifa climbs the stairs in her bar looks like a kind of combat dance. The film opens with a smoky cloud-scape and sustains that image perpetually.