Ok, this is my interpretation of what happened (and what happened in the game).
Earth has two sections to it:
Life Stream (Souls)
The Living World (The world we live in)
All things was a balance between these, when someone dies from the Living World, they are sent into the Life Stream and recycled to be reincarnated again.
Shinryaa used the Life Stream as an energy source to make life easier, but at the same time, used the Life Stream to forcefully create humans, in this case were called SOLDIERS.
The world would have been destroyed anyway, (If you think about how the anime series Bleach works), when you use all the souls from the Life Stream to use as energy, there would be no longer be souls to be reincarnated and thus humans would cease to exist. However, something else happened before this could happen.
Jenova is a planet parasite, it's sole purpose is to destroy each planet, and using the previous planet to travel to other ones to destroy the next one. Jenova had dropped down into the crater on Earth(How the movie started), parts of which entered the life stream. Shinryaa found Jenova and isolated the cells from it to create humans from them (The Sephiroph Clones).
During this time, Shinyraa was creating humans from the life stream, thus Cloud was born.(From the Black Haired Cloud) (But it turned out that Cloud was born from a previous soul-- a soul that has known Tifa as a child). The side effect is that being forcefully put into a body directly from the Life Stream, Cloud still had recollections from his previous life. Of course, there is a sideffect to this as well, this is because when Cloud was reborn, the Life Stream was already infected with cells of Jenova.
Geostigma was the effects of Jenova tainting the Life Stream, thus, MOSTLY CHILDREN were the ones that were affected by Geostigma. Geostigma is an immune response of the body to get rid of the cells of Jenova, however, it would eventually self destruct itself since Jenova's "Soul" was mixed with the Soul of the Life Stream. This would also explain why Cloud was infected with Geostigma as well.
At the end, Sephiroph was to accomplish what was in the gene's of Jenova to destroy every planet in the universe from the entity of "Jenova" while Cloud represented "Mother Earth" as a soldier to protect it.
That's my interpretation of the overlying story-- I could be totally wrong though since I havn't played FF7 for like 3 years lol.
In my opinion, they made the "important plot" too quick. For example, explaining all the "Mother" and all the sub plot-- they did EXTREMELY lightly. In that case, it made the entire story kinda like... 90% Fighting, 10% Plot. However, I think that if we all played FF7 again, we would realize that the 10% of plot actually has A LOT more weight than we thought previously. (In which case, we would remember what happened in the game in FF7 to relate to movie), this would make the movie more enjoyable I think.
I don't think it would be enjoyable at all to the people who didn't play FF7 no doubt, they'd get totally confused!!! (And they wouldn't have those chills you have in your back when they were fighting Bahamut when each one of the older characters appeared)
Also, don't you notice that Cloud's facial expressions resembled Sora from Kingdom Hearts? I think those expressions are so accurate =x.
Oh yeah, so that weird Grey Wolf that appeared a lot-- I think that was Vincent's limit break form =x
The black haired dude next to Aerith at the end I THINK was Cloud's old reincarnation.
I think there was a big symbolic thing between the Black Life Stream and Kadaj(Being filled with the soul of Jenova) and the Clear Life Stream that purified it all at the end.
I definetly think that this movie beats Matrix in terms of the fighting. In terms of plot, it is heavily game based, so added the game, the plot would be extremely well done as well.
