A review from Neogaf that has substance:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=213251142&postcount=1437
Okay, so yeah. Well, that was... something. The film felt like Jon Snow from Game of Thrones. A bastard child possibly from an aborted relationship that ended badly, raised by someone who is honor-bound to care and treat it like family, but aware enough that it isn't good enough to showcase and legitimize as an heir. I would give it a solid A+ for technical effort, and a C- for the actual result.
The film is simple enough. It's about an elite taskforce set up by Regis to help repel the invading army over the course of a 12 year war. The taskforce is made up of people from the regions outside of Insomnia, considered "foreigners" by "pure" Lucians. There's an attempt to make a social statement about immigrant conscription and what a home is to these people, but none of it is really deep. Instead most of the runtime is filled with action setpieces which range from kinda entertaining to whatthefuckamIlookingatcantseeshit. Mostly the latter. The sound mixing is also incredibly poor, making chaotic quick cut action scenes even more confusing because the audio cues are just a mess.
For those who have not already read 50 wikipedia articles about the lore and setting of Final Fantasy XV, it's really easy to get lost in this film. There isn't much exposition, which is usually a good thing, but there really isn't much development either which is not okay. The film starts with a long droning narration by Luna about the state of the world and how the war started, but instead of feeling like an organic introduction to a fantasy story, it feels like a poorly edited LAST TIME ON FINAL FANTASY XV intro in a TV show.
I liked a lot of the designs, and I think the conscious attempt to ground the direction in the non-action scenes actually worked. Unfortunately there simply isn't enough of these scenes, and while they try to do quite a bit with the small original cast in the film, a lot of it falls flat and feels wasted because no one really knows any of these characters, and never will. Without a connection to these people, the only thing we have to go on is what they say about themselves, which frankly isn't interesting at all. There isn't enough interaction between the characters to build up any sort of natural dynamic and development for any sacrifice or tragedy to have impact.
I think long time FF fans, especially FFVII fans will be very pleased with the visual homages and boss nods throughout. Unfortunately that's all surface level fanservice because there's no reason for any of them actually being in the film. They're just pretty props. The final action set piece was clearly designed to be visually complex and I totally got what Nozue was going for in designing it the way he did, but his lack of ability to execute it in an elegant way made the entire fight confusing and messy rather than showcasing a really cool comparison of scale between two related but separate duels going on at the same time. Huge waste there.
Yeah, the film wasn't very good at all. But it's a Final Fantasy movie, so I guess it was pretty much what I expected. I wonder how useful it will be as a promotional tool for FFXV though. At my screening when the credits started rolling, it felt like the entire audience had a collective "huh, that's it?" reaction. And those who stayed for the post-credit game tease just laughed.
