...please don't tell me you think the final cut of AC leaving out at least a third of the storyline including all the context made it a more intelligent movie. It really didn't. Making your audience work to understand what's even going on is a cheap way to pad a straightforward narrative, and sometimes it's actually useful and productive, but it's never the same as being deep.
Cloud became a less complicated character by writing his depression covering everything for the entire movie. I'd respect it more as a writing choice if the way it was executed didn't look suspiciously like a hack to make the movie easier to create.
To be honest I preferred the original first cut version of the film.
The "Wolf and Sword Grave" was a big enough hint to anyone about Zack really.
The scenes with Flowers implied Aerith regardless.
I think, overall people who dive in to AC without having any FF7 knowledge "ought" to be ignorant, because it's supposed to raise questions that you can answer by experiencing the other stories yourself.
The argument that "certain games" don't portray Cloud as accurately as others, while valid, doesn't sit well with me.
For example, do you say Cloud in Fortune Street (Itadaki Street) isn't Cloud? The game is a spinoff of Monopoly, like Mario Party. Where do you draw the line on what is and isn't Cloud?
I think there's a bare minimum of things players appreciate about Cloud as a character to want to play as him in one game or another.
Character analysis in the main story is one thing, but it doesn't take Rocket Town Science to just appreciate Cloud in the games he's been in.
...I'm just saying he gets severely oversimplified a lot, and it does him disservice?
Like, I'm not saying Superman <em>isn't Superman</em> when he cameos in your cartoon and punches the bad guy out and says something about 'truth, justice, and the American Way!' but Clark is a complicated person with a lot of complex feelings and relationships, and if a Superman movie is producing the same amount of depth and complexity as the cameo we begin to have a problem.
And I'm not really comparing the theatrical cut with Complete, either, when I say AC was incoherent, and I don't just mean for people who didn't already know the franchise and get the references.
I mean that while they didn't need to explain it all in exhaustive detail, the fact that there was a degenerative illness killing a lot of people, especially children, and that Cloud also had it, and so did Denzel, were all important things to know a lot earlier than they became clear.
For that matter, Denzel's entire plotline works a lot better when he's clearly tied to Cloud &co as a member of their vaguely defined family, instead of just kind of...around. It's one thing to have new appreciation for the hidden meaning and foreshadowing the second time you watch something, it's another to have put pins in half the stuff you see and only the second time through be able to go 'oh,
that's why there even is a scene focusing on this.'
There is
a lot of jumping around from place to place without any real justification--like for example cutting from Edge to 'on the Northern Continent riding my bike through a forest you can't interact with directly in the game' without any discussion of how
anybody crossed the ocean or how Cloud tracked Kadaj & co or why it's only Cloud on this high-stakes rescue mission.
They actually do try to justify why only Cloud fights the final battle, and like Tifa not coming along to rescue Marlene and Denzel, that's one that really goes over better if you
haven't played FFVII. Like, 'obviously, that's what The Main Character
does.'
