I always give second chances to everything because I know that everything or everyone deserve a chance for redemption, there are those who fail and those who succeed and I especially love to see how someone or something can learn from the past mistakes and improve into something greater and better but without losing the original nature.
I don't watch many movies because I essentially hate watching 1hour and 30 minutes or 2 hours of a quickly made story that hardly can leave space for a bigger world characterization and better character, but this can only be me because I'm more used to series of many episodes, and hardly I find something that ends up liked by me; a little different story is for the movie episodes of a series because, despite what I said before, they are going eventually to get filled with the remaining episodes, in fact an example is the masterclass of the "The Garden of Sinners" movie series that started confused and I ended up loving it or even the Fate/stay night Heaven's Feel trilogy of movies that made me crazy even after playing the VN.
But what about Sword Art Online? SAO is massively full of flaws and we all know this and it can't be denied : boring arcs, fillers, some weak and random characters and many useless decisions in terms of story progress. But there was always that diamond piece in that garbage that was the absolutely insane and fantastic concept and starting point of the VRMMORPG, the literal game of Sword Art Online in Aincrad, and Progressive could be the good starting point of a remake of the story into something greater than the anime. I liked how Progressive actually had a different story from the anime and how it even improved from the original.
But was Progressive able to do so? To me, yes it did and I will bring you in this movie with me.
My first thought with this movie, my first impression, was a positive one because it started already with telling Asuna's background, because it was left quite empty in the anime, and showed us her family, her friends and the reason why she entered SAO; but what I think is the best part is the real reason why she started SAO : she wanted to play with her only friend at school, who also has some demons of the past, and I even more loved how it was displayed that Asuna was a true noob, unlike in the anime where she was a true god, and learned with time and hard work, and sometimes desperation.
The movie is in fact extremely human because it shows very specific situations and gives a human feedback that can be anger of being abandoned, fear of dying and not coming back, desperation to find a way to survive of the true happiness of eating something good after a long time; and all of this links the movie to becoming darker in terms of ambient because the dominant feeling for a big piece of the movie is the true desperation when you face the possibility to die, something that was present in the SAO anime but disappeared with time to leave gags and funny episodes, and all of this led to a really great character development for Asuna from being a scared puppy to reaching the alpha female, the restless solo player, and for once feeling free from what she was forced and expected to do, the absolute best of the class at school with the best grades of all because her family was expecting so. Related to this I found significant the dream of Asuna of being appreciated by her family but I will leave the full context to you.
I was surprised by how much Asuna was able to develop in the movie, like as I said from being a scared puppy to being the Asuna we know, and I liked even more how she approached every situation : in the anime I always saw Asuna as a fearless leader who was the dominant player since the first day and so I thought she faced every problem with ease, instead it was quite the opposite and she was always led by her emotions and never thought of her real needs like eating and sleeping, a desperate warrior trying to calm the anger, and being able to see a completely different character from what you were expecting is really sweet. And being able to forgive, I wasn't expecting that.
Talking about Mito, I liked her. Mito is a good addition to the story as a reason for Asuna to join the game and progress over time thanks to her help and Mito is what made me say "this is a human SAO" because essentially she is the incarnation of your average player : a bastard going after the loot, who likes to help the noob friends but scared of losing every progress and so will think about the own good to then regret it completely and look for being forgiven. Mito is really cool and gave to Asuna a reason to keep going and improving, and I love her character design.
But what about Kirito? I loved how he had a really small amount of time because this is not his anime, this is all about Asuna but at the same time I liked how he behaved when he had to be put in : never lost his temper, always cool and loyal to his original character, by any means the beater who wants to help the weak but doesn't really know how to do so. It was sweet to see scenes from the anime being reworked again and made even better when it came to Asuna and Kirito being in the same party and having to interact with each other.
One of the strongest points of Progressive can be even the comedy because here it's not too much or too little but it's the right amount at the right time unlike the original anime where a lot of filler episodes were made only for the comedy and completely forgot about the original story and themes. Progressive had few but really good comedy moments and I enjoyed every single bit of them. In fact I love how this movie stays loyal to what it wants to be and doesn't exaggerate with the stuff or simply doesn't go too much over the lines and keeps a good distance from the original work. Overall the story is really good paced and I didn't feel many forced decisions but instead a good storytelling for a movie.
But if I have to talk about some of the downs then I have to mention that some parts felt a little bit forced and I am not your biggest fan of time skips, but there are only 1 hour and 30 minutes of time to tell a story so I can easily let it slide, but overall I feel like every character had the fair amount of time in the movie.
I wasn't too surprised but the animations are amazing once again and they are smooth, clear, polished and essentially fun to watch and the fight scenes were, once again, absolutely fun to watch with few resting times and a lot of thrill. The details of the city environment are great once again and the general visual effects are again fun.
The music is again absolutely amazing thanks to that legend of Yuki Kajiura and I really want to give her immortality because her music is absolutely top of the class.
Because I see it as a massive improvement compared to the original Sword Art Online and Progressive has the chance to rewrite its story, more or less because you can't cancel what the original work is unfortunately, but if I had to rewatch something I would probably rewatch this because it was absolutely fun to watch.
Story : 7.8/10
Characters : 8/10
Animations : 9/10
Music : 10/10
Personal Enjoyment : 8/10
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