World of ruin: Final Fantasy VII (1997).

Not coming to a theater near you.

It's got snowboarding, giant robots, ancient prophecies, prostitution, ninjas, genetic engineering, vampires, cross-dressing, televised executions, Korean BBQ, astronauts, and the apocalypse.

It's a game about casting magic spells that also features minigames for doing squats and performing CPR. It's a story about a grotesque Elder God threatening to wipe out humanity, a plot which frequently takes a backseat to an anime love triangle and bird racing.

It's one of the most loved, hated, mythologized and misunderstood games of all time, and strangely enough, it's one that very few people seem to remember accurately. And with the recently-revealed remake on its way and the HD version available on PS4, there's never been a better time to revisit Final Fantasy VII.

(Note: I have attempted to avoid major plot spoilers in this post, despite this being probably the most-spoiled video game of all time, because my main point here is that You Should Play Final Fantasy VII.)

There's also a My Bloody Valentine reference within the first hour or so. And this was in 1997, before everyone knew they were cool.

In this era of video games as blockbuster entertainment, returning to FF7—itself one of the first modern gaming blockbusters—is a bracing experience.

Modern games are frequently big only in the most nominal sense, offering up expansive playgrounds filled with copy-pasted tedium and checklists of cookie-cutter content. But Final Fantasy VII is something different: it's a strange, sui generis epic with Promethean ambitions and a ton of heart.

Even with its super-deformed characters (whose dated animations still have more personality than a lot of today's HD automatons), it's hard not to be swept up in FF7 right from the opening scenes. Storming Shinra headquarters and escaping in a motorcycle chase straight out of Akira could've been the white-knuckle conclusion to any other game; here, it's just the opening act.

One of the best moments in all of video games is coming to the end of this weird, wonderful caper and realizing it's only a cold open, with a whole world left to explore.

FF7.jpg

FF7 has fallen victim to its own legend, which has come to overshadow and obscure the actual game. This is pretty ironic, since the fallibility of memory plays such a crucial part in the game's story.

Geek commonplace holds that Cloud, the game's spiky-haired protagonist, is the mopey emo wimp that ended a proud tradition of happy-go-lucky JRPG heroes. But that's revisionist history: Cloud spends most of the game throwing out snarky one-liners and acting like a smug, mercenary asshole. He's the lovable rogue to Barret's po-faced hippy moralizer. For most of the game, Cloud is much closer to Han Solo than Shinji Ikari.

But he's also not the only character bowdlerized in the popular consciousness. Aeris, the flower girl from the streets of Midgar, is often depicted as a delicate, ethereal princess, for reasons I will avoid discussing. But this caricature has very little in common with the worldly, self-possessed, and impishly mischievous heroine encountered in the game; in her interactions with Cloud, she's Han Solo. (After all, he's just a bumpkin from Nibelhim; she grew up in the slums.)

Tifa, the game's other major female character, is precisely the opposite. Like her contemporary Lara Croft, Tifa is often remembered as a spunky sex symbol thanks to her considerable polygonal assets, but the real Tifa is much more complex: a wistful, romantic bundle of trauma and frustrated longing who just happens to beat up monsters with her bare hands. And even with all her mistakes and hang-ups, she steps capably into the role of leader when the heroic protagonist loses his nerve.

Tifa is one of the most interesting video game characters there is, and the fact that almost nobody ever notices is entirely in keeping with her role in FF7.

To be fair, she has help from Cid, whose character concept is basically "Chuck Yeager crossed with Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa." FF7's cast is full of characters like this: huge amounts of personality crammed into a handful of polygons.

The writing is much better than it gets credit for, and the game's uniqueness still shines through a notoriously dodgy translation (which often serves only to make the game even more endearing, in the classic Final Fantasy tradition). Even in English, there are powerful moments; in a chilling turn of phrase, a particularly terrifying monster is referred to as "a calamity from the skies."

Yes, FF7 is a JRPG, complete with amnesia, mysterious evil, and a motley group of heroes on a quest to save the world, but it also sidesteps cliché in interesting ways. After all, it's a rare game that has its tough guy hero start cross-dressing before the intro is over.

And every "badass" character in the game is deconstructed somehow: the Turks, the game's slick, modish Men In Black, are also incompetents who gossip like the cast of Mean Girls; Vincent, the shape-shifting vampire gunslinger, is a sad sack goth dork who gets mercilessly roasted by a teenage girl. (Note to anyone revisiting the game: keep Yuffie in your party, she has a lot of the best dialogue.)

The cross-dressing episode is actually the tamest part of the Wall Market section, much of which plays out like Mac and Dennis' discussion of bears, twinks, and power bottoms from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Note: the characters on the sign over the gym read "MEN MEN MEN". 

Just as FF7's characters have been distorted by time, the details of its plot have collapsed into a blur of vague concepts: giant weapons, an evil corporation, the end of the world. But here, too, the reality is much more interesting.

At the core of FF7's mythos is a simple but poignant fable about the Faustian bargain of civilization. The Planet was once inhabited by a nomadic race called the Ancients, who lived in harmony with nature and traveled from place to place in search of a fabled Promised Land. (The game strongly suggests that the Promised Land is not a literal place, and that the search is what really matters; it's a bit like the Kingdom of God in Christianity, in that it suggests a variety of possible meanings that vary with time and place.)

One day, some of the Ancients decided to stay in one place and build settlements, forgoing their spiritual quest in exchange for a life of convenience, and becoming human in the process. This shift to settled life (which mirrors early man's transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculturalist) begins a spiral of ruin that culminates in the industrial dystopia of Midgar, a stratified city of polluting Mako reactors and abject human suffering. And the few surviving Ancients, who can literally hear the whispers of the Planet, find that these voices grow increasingly distant.

Later in the game, you discover that Mako energy comes from the Lifestream, a continuum of the souls of living beings; this means that Shinra is in the business of literally harvesting souls and processing them into fuel. Enron, eat your heart out.

Shinra is the classic cyberpunk megacorp by way of the traditional Japanese zaibatsu: a vertically integrated "power company" with its own private army, bioweapons research division, and space program. (See also: Weyland-Yutani, similarly redolent of the "Japan Inc." era.)

At the beginning of the game, Cloud joins AVALANCHE, an ELF-style group committed to destroying Shinra. He joins for purely mercenary reasons; like Han Solo at the beginning of Star Wars, he's not interested in revolution. And AVALANCHE's opposition to Shinra is largely materialist, rooted more in the bleakness and misery of the Midgar slums than the legend of the Ancients and the Promised Land.

But as Cloud and company get outside the city, leaving industrial modernity behind, they encounter the forgotten history of the Planet and reconnect with the sacred search that their ancestors abandoned. It doesn't seem accidental that a character who provides a crucial cosmological lecture to the heroes on this journey is named after Johannes Bugenhagen, Martin Luther's pastor in Wittenberg and a key figure in the Reformation. 

There are other intriguing allusions, like a giant artillery cannon called the "Sister Ray" and a pagoda filled with martial artists named after Russian authors. And perhaps most significantly, there's a high-ranking Shinra apparatchik named Heidegger. The fact that the character is a boorish, vulgar toady could be a jab at the great thinker, or simply ironic. (His association with Shinra might suggest the real Heidegger's complicity with Nazism, given the low value Shinra places on human lives.)

Still, invoking the philosopher's name at all serves only to highlight the themes the game shares with his work: human existence as inextricable from a world that tasks us with taking responsibility for our own lives; and the dismantling of contemporary assumptions to rediscover questions posed by the Ancients.

"Have you lost your way? When that happens we each have to take a good long look at ourselves. There's always something in the deepest reaches of our hearts. Something buried, or something forgotten."

Like (the real) Heidegger, Cloud and company do not advocate a simple return to the ways of the Ancients, if such a thing were even possible; they are not "fundamentalists." Instead they practice a kind of archaeology, uncovering ways of thinking and modes of existence that have been concealed by modern assumptions.

"Archaeology" is actually a strong recurring theme in FF7. Cloud and company's "archaeology of knowledge" (a la Foucault) is typically metaphorical, but it's often literal too; the game frequently has you exploring sealed and forgotten ruins in search of lost knowledge and buried secrets. And archaeology is also referenced in one of the game's key events: how Shinra discovered the lifeform known as Jenova "in a 2,000 year old geological stratum."

As they travel the world, Cloud and his party discover the origins of Shinra hegemony in places like North Corel, a mining town brutally subjugated by Shinra troops; Gongaga, a tiny village decimated by a Mako reactor explosion; Rocket Town, a kind of rust belt hamlet left to rot when Shinra abandoned its space program; and Cosmo Canyon, an ancient adobe city outside Shinra's dominon, devoted to the study of the Planet. Each destination reveals the history that gave shape to the present, and alternative ways of living that have fallen into eclipse thanks to Shinra 's dominion.

Along the way, a world without such wanton environmental destruction becomes thinkable, and a world order that once seemed inevitable and unchanging is revealed to be the contingent product of a traceable past. The train of Midgar, which "can't run anywhere except where its rails take it", is left behind; the journey itself opens up new territory and new possibilities. (As anyone who remembers Barret's dialogue can attest, train metaphors abound in FF7.)

"In its essence, technology is something that man does not control."

[Side note: the process of liberation for Cloud and company is still bound up with technology, with more of the world map opening up as you acquire new vehicles: a dune buggy, a seaplane, a submarine, etc. However, it's worth noting that the ultimate vehicle is not the magnificent airship Highwind, but the gold chocobo; the only vehicle that can go anywhere in the game is a living creature.]

This process of archaeology becomes particularly literal toward the end of the game's first disc, when Cloud physically digs up the Lunar Harp in Bone Village and opens the passage to the Forgotten Capital, where one of the game's most memorable scenes takes place. (I'm gritting my teeth trying not to reveal what happens to the 0.0001% who don't already know.)

Barring the party's journey towards enlightenment is Sephiroth, the game's ultimate villain and a dark mirror of Cloud. Sephiroth also despises Shinra, but he takes AVALANCHE's environmentalism to its most radical possible conclusion: the only way to redeem the Planet is to remove mankind and civilization from the equation.*

"Something terrible came to the hills and valleys on that meteor, and something terrible—though I know not in what proportion—still remains."

This reasoning is not so far removed from that of deep ecologists like Pentti Linkola, who believe that without a mass die-off of human beings, environmental catastrophe will continue indefinitely.  As another fictional villain from the same era put it, "human beings are a disease; we are the cure."

Both the heroes and the villain accept that the present structure of civilization is evil; in a sense, they only differ on the question of how deep the rot goes. Pretty intense themes for a video game about ninjas and talking stuffed animals—especially circa 1997.

* When Bugenhagen discusses the Planet's survival with Cloud later in the game, he leaves open the question of whether or not such a future would include humanity. The following is a spoiler for the game's ending sequence, but it really demands mention; highlight to read. FF7 preserves this ambiguity right through its final scene: 500 years after the events of the game, a much older Red XIII and his descendants watch over the ruins of Midgar, now covered with overgrowth and being reclaimed by the Planet.

Only two years separated FF7 and The Matrix. Much has been made of the film's similarity to Grant Morrison's classic comic The Invisibles, but it also has a lot in common with FF7. Then again, perhaps all three just tapped in to the collective unconscious of the 1990s.

Of course, Sephiroth's motivations are not really altruistic, and as the game goes on you discover that he is less interested in restoring the Planet than harnessing its energies for his own purposes. In this, he is much like Shinra, viewing the Planet and the Lifestream as resources to be exploited rather than shepherded.

But whereas Shinra at least has an interest in keeping its customers alive to extract money from them, Sephiroth has no such restraint. He aspires instead towards godhood—and as any JRPG fan knows, the ultimate genre cliche is the ending where you have to kill a god. The possibilities inherent in this final confrontation are outlined in Heidegger's famous 1966 interview with Der Spiegel:

[All merely human meditations and endeavors] will not be able to bring about a direct change of the present state of the world...Only a god can still save us. I think the only possibility of salvation left to us is to prepare readiness, through thinking and poetry, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god during the decline; so that we do not, simply put, die meaningless deaths, but that when we decline, we decline in the face of the absent god.

Much of the party's journey consists of preparing and readying themselves for this confrontation, and significantly, the only power capable of stopping Sephiroth's "ultimate destructive magic" is called Holy.

This willowy anime heel has usurped the power of a god. Are you a bad enough dude to defeat a god? (URL: videogamesandthebible.com)

So yeah, FF7 is a JRPG. And like all JRPGs, it's a long game. But when this epic length works, as it does here and in games like Persona 4, it recalls Kenneth Turan's description of The Seven Samurai:

It allows us to observe each of [its] many characters in the round, from every angle, to view them as individuals with their own backstories, philosophies, martial arts skills, and reasons for being there. We get to know them naturally, the way we get to know our friends: by putting in the time.

This is a big part of FF7's enduring appeal: it's a game about deeply flawed and very human characters (even the non-human ones). They're a band of criminals, failures, thieves, outcasts, weirdos, cowards, and frauds—and they're the only ones who can save the planet, which itself is sick and coming apart.

For once, the Kabbalistic allusions so beloved by Japanese developers (there's a villain named Sephiroth, after all) aren't just for show. At heart, this is a game about healing a broken world.

Or, in Aeris' immortal words: "this guy are sick."

Here's my advice: play Final Fantasy VII. Play it now, for the first time or the tenth. Don't wait for the remake. Hopefully it will be great, but even if it exceeds all expectations it will still be a different game, because things have changed a lot since 1997. When FF7 was made, video games were still a niche hobby only just making the leap into 3D graphics, with stories that rarely went beyond "the princess is in another castle."

FF7's TV spots trumpeted a "multi-million dollar budget" and "years of development", things which are now de rigeur for every major release—but at the time, FF7 was a moonshot, and it shows.

PS: I haven't even said anything about the music. Nobuo Uematsu is perhaps the most beloved of all video game composers, and everyone has a different opinion about his best work—but the evocative power of FF7's soundtrack is undeniable. It's impossible to hear "Underneath the Rotting Pizza" or "Anxious Heart" and not be instantly transported back to Midgar. I'm also particularly partial to the haunting music that plays in the Forgotten Capital, building anticipation for one of the game's climactic moments. Add in the insanely hype boss music, and it's 1997 all over again.

Eternal Bad Luck Charm: Nothing Bad Can Happen (2013), The Gallows (2015), and Phantoms (1998).

Nothing Bad Can Happen (2013)

Apparently based on a true story, Nothing Bad Can Happen feels like a very precise mix of Let The Right One In and The Snowtown Murders—and as inspirations go, you'd be hard-pressed to find better ones.  (The comparison to Martyrs on the poster is misplaced; this is barely a horror movie.) It's the story of Tore, a homeless Christian punk living in Hamburg, and how he moves in with a family living on an allotment garden. From there, as with any horror movie, bad things do in fact happen. What's really interesting about Nothing Bad Can Happen is that, unlike Snowtown, it's not a portrait of psychopathy; Benno, the film's antagonist, certainly behaves monstrously, but he's no John Bunting. This film is really about the delicate power dynamics of families—especially ad-hoc, improvised ones—and how easily they can be disrupted by petty jealousies and resentments. As a persistently irreligious person myself, I found myself occasionally bristling at Tore's casual outpourings of faith, just as Benno and his family do—which made me feel bad, since Tore is more or less the sweetest guy in the world, rewarded with nothing but cruelty and torture. (Remind you of anyone?) I wonder about the title: I don't speak German, but "nothing bad can happen" seems like a broad translation of Tore Tanzt, which I kept thinking had to be a Biblical allusion of some kind. Very interested to see what director Karin Gebbe does in the future.

The Gallows (2015)
Execution is everything. A lot of horror is basically just riffing on Beowulf, and that's fine, because there's a reason we're still telling stories that have been around thousands of years. There are countless horror movies with prosaic setups (e.g. "vacation goes awry"), but there's a world of difference between Vacation Slasher 2349 and, say, Wolf Creek. But The Gallows actually has a really cool premise: the title is the name of a high school play that ended with its lead actor dead by hanging, and 20 years later the same school is ready to try again, despite the objections of the school board. The Gallows absolutely nails the high school milieu, with a setting that looks real and a believably teenage snottiness; the kid holding the camera is a colossal dick who reminded me a little of Dennis from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The friend that I saw it with said that, at first, it felt almost like a dark version of Glee—but once the horror movie stuff starts happening, it takes a sharp turn into mediocrity. I haven't soured on found footage, and I maintain that most of its detractors probably haven't seen the best it has to offer (e.g. Trollhunter, The Bay, Lake Mungo) but The Gallows definitely feels like FF by the numbers. Which is too bad, because it also feels like it could've been great.

Phantoms (1998)
Phantoms is the best Resident Evil movie ever made. Forget about Paul W.S. Anderson's overwrought films, because this one captures the gleeful, gruesome spirit of the original PS1 games much more successfully. It actually hit theaters in the same week that Resident Evil 2 (recently greenlit for a remake!) arrived in stores, which feels more like fate than coincidence given their similarities: a ruined town menaced by impossible creatures; soldiers in gas masks storming through damp sewer tunnels; a cop and a pair of civilians trapped in the middle. And like RE, Phantoms is a B-movie at its most joyfully unpretentious; it's not often you get to hear Peter O'Toole bellow lines like "This thing is what wiped out the dinosaurs—it's a pretty tough fucking customer!" (And Liev Schrieber, eternally professional, also embraces his role as a scenery-chewing grotesque without a hint of ironic distance.) It loses a little steam once all the questions have been answered, but along the way it's a hell of a lot of fun, and some of the effects hold up surprisingly well given their vintage. Plus, the "Ancient Aliens" style ending is a riot—hey Hollywood, how about a reboot?

Just to get away: It Follows (2014).

It Follows isn't just the best horror movie of 2014; it's the best horror movie of the last 20 years. It's a love letter to the genre, bursting with subtle and overt nods to the classics, but it's no postmodern pastiche. Elements feel familiar, but the parts that count—the scary parts—feel startlingly fresh. It's a gorgeous, vivid, wide-angle nightmare.

Believe the hype.

At times, you could be forgiven for thinking It Follows was the work of John Carpenter, come screaming out of retirement to deliver one last opus. Although Halloween was shot in Pasadena, the leafy Michigan suburbs where It Follows takes place could double for Laurie Strode's hometown of Haddonfield, and the whole film is laced with a wonderfully ominous, throbbing synthesizer soundtrack in the style of Carpenter's own sawtooth symphonies.

It Follows also suggests the golden age of end-of-the-century Japanese horror. Its central conceit—a lethal, unyielding supernatural contagion that operates according to a strange and unsettling set of rules—fits squarely in the tradition of Ringu and Ju-on, and the film's tableaux of crumbling Michigan houses and vacant public spaces recalls Kiyoshi Kurosawa's unique genius for finding the perfect abandoned Japanese buildings to get murdered in.

But It Follows is also a coming-of-age story, and it's every bit as aching and poignant as Let The Right One In. The standard horror template would see heroine Jay struggling to convince those around her that she's not crazy, but one of writer/director David Robert Mitchell's smartest decisions in It Follows is that her best friends—stalwart sister Kelly, boy-next-door Paul, and snarky bookworm Yara—believe her almost immediately, as we would hope our own friends would.

As frightening as It Follows is, it effortlessly evokes the weightlessness of drifting between adolescence and adulthood. Parents are little more than blurry background figures, but they loom large for the characters, who reference them often: "Won't your mom be mad?" Rather than the obvious readings some viewers have offered for It Follows (e.g. as AIDS allegory), the film often feels like a parable about a generation of young people adjusting to radically diminished expectations.

It helps that the whole young cast is sublime, from Daniel Zovatto's Damone-with-a-heart-of-gold to Jake Weary's anxious, apologetic Hugh, who sets the whole horrible drama in motion. The characters feel lived in, with unspoken histories between every line of dialogue.

One of the film's core themes (driven home by Yara's periodic quotations from Dostoevsky's The Idiot) is fatalism, a familiar mood for all of us marking time in a post-industrial cul-de-sac of downward mobility and paycheck-to-paycheck living. Jay's nightmare dramatizes a familiar contemporary predicament: feeling trapped in the place where you grew up, with all hopes for the future put on hold while you try and figure out how you're going to make it through another week, or another day.

But make no mistake: It Follows is a horror movie. And once it gets up and running, it ruthlessly and patiently develops its central premise, continually adding new wrinkles and raising the stakes. Like the original Ju-on, there are images in this movie that might haunt you for the rest of your life, and there are moments that will have you white-knuckling the armrest like a kid seeing The Exorcist for the first time.

After you see it, you just might catch yourself looking over your shoulder, checking the doors and the windows of the room you're in, wondering how quickly you could get away. You know, if you had to.

Is there any greater compliment to a horror movie than that?

Blood feuds: Blue Ruin (2013), Wer (2013), V/H/S: Viral (2014).

Blue Ruin (2013)
There's been some buzz online for Green Room, Jeremy Saulnier's upcoming feature that has Patrick Stewart playing a neo-Nazi. Interested parties would do well to check out Saulnier's prior offering, a festival darling called Blue Ruin. This spare, bloody film chronicles one man's quest for revenge as he finds himself pulled into an old-fashioned blood feud. It plays almost like an inverted version of Drive, where that film's icy, synthesized cool is replaced with leafy, Confederate pastoralia. Both films share the western's sense of violent grace, and its pinpoint focus on isolated outsiders who dispense a merciless form of premodern justice. But what gives Blue Ruin such a unique frisson is Macon Blair's turn as the hapless antihero Dwight: in contrast to Ryan Gosling's cool, consummate Driver, Dwight is a pathetic, marginal fuck-up, eating garbage and struggling to scrounge up enough cash for a gun to kill his enemies with. He is a figure of genuine pathos, closer to Gollum than Steve McQueen, but shot through with lethal purpose nonetheless. Blue Ruin is beautiful and strange, bloody and haunting. Highest recommendation.

Wer (2013)
Werewolves often seem to play second fiddle to vampires, but being so close to a silver medal just seems to make them hungrier, as werewolf movies often work harder to put a twist on the mythos. Such is the case with Wer, a wolfen murder mystery set in present-day France. A.J. Cook plays Kate, an American expatriate lawyer who takes up the case of Talan Gwynek, a towering, taciturn bumpkin believed to have torn a hapless family of campers to shreds. But there's more going on than meets the eye (isn't there always?), and Wer does a nice job of confounding expectations. What really puts it over the top are the startlingly violent action sequences, which are staged with a splattery, bone-crunching brutality that's downright refreshing in such well-worn mythical terrain. Wer presents the wolfman as he should be: a true force of nature, red in tooth and claw. The modern vampire has been fighting domestication ever since Anne Rice gave us the tortured Louis Pont du Lac, but Wer is proof positive that their hairy cousins remain as wild and untamed as ever.

V/H/S: Viral (2014)
I really can't say enough good things about the V/H/S series. Undeterred by the increasingly shrill horde of found footage detractors, V/H/S and V/H/S/2 not only made anthology movies cool again, but delivered a passel of stylish and imaginative shocks along the way, courtesy of young hotshots like Adam Wingard (You're Next), Ti West (The Innkeepers), and Gareth Evans (The Raid and The Raid 2). Unfortunately, many are going to point to V/H/S: Viral as the series' shark-jumping moment, but it's not nearly as bad as you might think. The main thing that separates this one from the first two is tone: where the earlier entries had a hard-edged, illicit vibe that felt like a cleaned-up version of August Underground, V/H/S: Viral is pure B-movie, drive-in cheese. Once you accept this, though, it's also a blast. The opening salvo, concerning a stage magician with a bloodthirsty enchanted cloak, is a terrifically endearing piece of schlock, and the follow-up vignette about a scientist who builds a dimensional gateway in his basement follows suit. But the best short is the third, about a group of skateboarders who travel to Tijuana and wind up with more than cuts and scrapes. It channels Larry Clark, Jackass, and Adrián García Bogliano's awesome Here Comes the Devil in nearly equal measure, and it feels closer to "classic" V/H/S than anything else here. I'll admit that I hope this is more of a spin-off, and that we get a V/H/S/3 in the gritty, analog style of the first two—but if you can accept that V/H/S: Viral is a different kind of film, you'll have a lot of fun.