text: This movie was definitely scripted with FF VII fans ONLY in mind. I am someone who has never played the original game and watched it with a friend who was a series fan. From a visual and technical standpoint this movie is just as good as "The Spirits Within", if not better, but from a story standpoint, I was pretty lost. One major plot weakness that stood out to me was the scene where "all" of the children dying of geostigma were brought to the healing "reunion" by the three Jenovites. All told there were about 15 kids in all... Hmmmm... I thought that this Geostigma was an illness of pandemic proportions... I understand why they did it that way (time, budget,CPU), but it just seemed cheesy after all the explanation about how the bad guys needed to collect all of those who had Jenova cells so that Jenova could be reincarnated. The subtitle version that we had (some fan sub from the internet) was a pretty direct translation and therefore probably added to my confusion.<br /><br />It did prick my interest in FF VII however, and I spent a few hours on the FF VII wiki reading about the main characters and the plot. Once I read the Advent Children wiki, things made a lot more sense. If you are a video game or Sci-Fi fan this movie is a pretty good flick, but like a previous review said, it comes off like a 90 minute fight scene. You never really get to know any of the characters, and the story does just seem to jump from scene to scene without much explanation, even though some explanation just might be required. Thank goodness for wikpedia.