Freshly baked opinion straight outta the movie theater
minor spoilers ahead, they won’t ruin the movie I promise.
So. Positive things: the concept is fucking wild. I know virtual reality isn’t nothing new but the fact that virtual reality has so much control over your life despite you not being trapped into it because of some crazy bs (looking at you SAO) is really nice. The creator of the game being probably the most interesting character and I think he’s really well written, the fact that we get to know him it’s really clever and interesting.
But how much more interesting would have been to know him through his work? How much fucking interesting would have been to actually see the game?? We hear a lot about oasis, a lot is told to us but we never actually see it!! Show don’t tell is like the first rule of movies, show us how much amazing is this oasis. I was so hyped up when that wonderful clip with lots of worlds played at the first 5 minutes of the movie but all we get to see are 4, maybe 5 if we want to include the lobby, boring as hell world enviroments. One of wich wasn’t even original. What do we have? The generic lobby, the generic death place, a night club, a lobby made by real life shootings and a 3d rendering of the shining movie.
Look at these generic ass mountains, this supposed to be the setting of the climax of the movie. You are not confined by reality movie goddamn make something out of it.
You say you can be anyone you want and do everything you want? Show me. Show me a colorful city like splatoon as a lobby, show me some weird nerdy interesting club instead of a dark hole with some fancy lighting effects. I’m supposed to fall in love with oasis, feel sorry if they actually steal it from the public, I should want to enter oasis. But I dont’. It really felt like they didn’t have either the heart or the money to do it and something says to me is the latter considering they maybe spent too much budgent on copyrights for cameos… sure, it’s a fun search for your favourite game, but not worth the price.
Another thing (maybe two) I acually despited were the characters and consequencially the unnecessary romace subplot. Not all of them are compleately spineless archetypes, some are barely interesting but I felt like the two protagonists and the antagonist (just the most important of the movie) were the most bland and poorly done.
He is basically a self insert. There’s nothing wrong with self inserts fanfiction style but they’re usually not interesting enough to be in a movie. You know how Bella from twilight was bland so anyone could see themself in her? Here it’s the same thing with our protag-kun. He is a gamer. That’s all we know about him. And he falls in love with a girl who is a badass. And that’s all we know about her. I don’t care enough about these characters to make me wish their success, you just don’t give me enough information. There’s this thing with her father dying because of the evil guy and that’s why she’s so mad at them but she just awkwardly blurts it out and it’s just briefly mentioned another time. It’s like they couldn’t find a way to care about her other than try to make us feel sorry for her tragic past.
Leaving the fact that he fell in love with her in like the first 20 minutes of the movie after talking to her like 3 times. I don’t give a shit about characters falling in love with each other if first I haven’t fall in love with them myself. I don’t have any reason to root for them other than “they’re the progonists and they’re obviously pushed on one another to appeal general audience but mostly girls who were dragged in there by their boyfriends”. And I know that because their relationship adds absolutely nothing to the general plot. It doesn’t make the characters grow, it doesn’t drive the main plot foward, it’s just there.
In conclusion, did I like this movie? Yes. I had a blast watching it! It was really interesting to see and really kind of pleasing to the eye and as I already stated, the main plotline is pretty solid and really makes you want to keep watching.
I just think they could have sacrificed the romance and some moments of the action scenes (like the race and the final battle wich were so long and uniteresting I found myself zooning out a couple of times) in favor of more and better worldbuilding and character developming.
I’m now going to read the book because I’m really curious if it were unfortunates choises on stage or if it was already settled from the start.
Tldr; The movie is good and worth seeing and I enjoyed it a lot but I think the direction made poor choises negletting worldbuilding and likability of the characters making them fall in love with each other (with unnecessary boring romance subplot) before I could give a damn about them.
