As part of an (ill-advised) attempt to make a comprehensive isekai tier list, I decided to sit down with some friends to watch every piece of SAO media available to me in as close to one sitting as I could get. This was the last piece of media I watched after finishing Ordinal Scale (I didn't realize it was before Alicization. Whoops) and was so checked out of the end of that movie that the bar of expectations was on the floor for this one.
Cue my surprise when half an hour in, I realize I want to go get something to drink but don't feel like I can because I'm too invested in what's happening onscreen.
SAO did that? Really?
I have no nostalgia for this series, I got into anime early in college. So when I sat down to watch this, I took in all the ugly plot-hole ridden mess that was SAO Seasons 1 and (to a lesser extent) 2. By this point I expected little out of the series, but this movie gripped me in a way nothing that day had even come close to doing.
First, the elephant in the room. The SAO Progressive Aria movie is very loosely adapted from the light novel of the same name, and this movie take many liberties in adapting that material. Though a handful of scenes and themes remain from that novel, the first entire half of this movie was fabricated for the sake of this movie. This is objectively a bad adaptation of its source material, and if you go into this looking for that, you will be disappointed.
I was not, however, and having since read the novel, I've come to the conclusion that the movie tells a better overall story.
What SAO always lacked, in my opinion, was the proper worldbuilding and time to flesh out its death game setting. How people act when put in a game environment under extremely high stress, and how people cope with that. This movie has that in SPADES, all through the eyes of our POV character, Asuna Yuuki.
This movie is told through the eyes of Asuna as it tells an alternate point of view of getting through episodes one and two of the Aincrad arc of SAO S1. To that end, Asuna is far from the confident, melancholic badass swordswoman we see in episode two, quite the opposite really. This movie tells the story of both how she learned the necessary skills to survive in SAO's world, how she ends up in the melancholic, doom-and-gloom state she is in episode two, and how she overcomes those things to find renewed purpose. It's more character work than we've ever gotten for the main cast outside of the Mother's Rosaria arc of SAO II, and by a very very long shot.
To that end, many of the characters we know and love(?) from SAO are recontextualized to make them fit better in a story about Asuna's growth, and to give them personal stakes in the story of their own. It recontextualizes beta testers, the role they played in SAO, and makes their misunderstood hero status more complicated by the end of the movie. There is a surprising amount of subtlety here if you look for it.
The greatest thing this movie does, though, is make Aincrad truly scary again. Trash mobs are legitimate threats. Early in the movie we see a group of players brutally hacked to death because they opened a rigged chest. Our main characters are constantly in danger of being overrun by strong monsters, or hordes of trash mobs that matter so much more because there is no respawning. This game makes you feel the dread of looking at another player, watching them crystalize and knowing they're gone. It's absolutely the thing SAO needed most and we got SO LITTLE of it in the original series.
This movie is everything I personally wanted SAO to be. It's not carrying deep messages about the human spirit, no. But it's so much more emotionally engaging than anything the main series has put out. I highly recommend this movie to anyone who was disappointed in the original SAO, if you're like me than this movie was exactly what you're looking for.
9/10
