I guess the first question is, can you watch this without seeing the rest of the series? Yes, but you probably shouldn’t, especially since the first eight episodes are available for free on YouTube. Also, the eighth episode is the first half of this movie, so you should skip that if you plan to see this in theaters.

Would you get what’s going on? Yes. On the other hand, you would not have the same sympathy for the characters and I think that’s kind of key here. There is a recap, but that can’t fix you not knowing and understanding the characters.

The explicitly asked me not to spoil it, so I won’t.

With that out of the way…

Even though I have seen the series, I would not have paid for this. Instead I used my membership for the local theater chain to see the movie for basically free. Now that I’ve seen it… maybe. It was a good movie and, if you are a big fan, there’s something here you want see on YouTube. Not much, but something.

For those who are new to this, a woman wakes up in a digital world as a joker character of some kind. She doesn’t remember her name, so she gets assigned Pomni. She meets her new “family”, who are other people in a similar situation, all controlled by Caine, a ringmaster of sorts, who tries to keep them occupied in his own cruel ways. Pomni immediately starts figuring out how to find her or their way back to reality. However, much of the series is about the group coming to terms with living in this situation and learning to become a community.

My big worry about this movie was whether they could come up with an ending that’s satisfying. After all, the setup wants a very specific thing to happen and considering the multiple years this has taken to produce, and there are specific expectations for what can happen. I don’t think everyone will like it, but I think they found a way to circumvent expectations. I think it was kind of beautiful and surprisingly logical.

Another worry came early on: There’s a short added scene in the beginning where a digital fish explains to us what’s going on. That fish had a horribly low resolution. Gladly that was not true for the rest of the movie.

Since we are talking about worries, I was also thinking about whether there would be a clear seam between the two episodes that were crammed together to form this movie. I think it was obvious when it happened, but it wasn’t so obvious that it took me out of the movie.

Then the good things: Many things set up earlier in the series were paid off here. We learn much about the characters and where they came from, although that’s a bit of an infodump.

And here’s a deeper cut: This was a heroine’s journey, a counterpart to the monomyth that isn’t talked about very much. The key difference (depending on the version of heroine’s journey) is that the hero’s journey is very individualistic, whereas heroine’s journey is about building a community and being able to fall back on it, when everything else fails. I think that was cool.

It’s a good movie. Should you spend your money to see it in these tough times? Maybe. It is a good movie, but it is also freely available, so it is hard for me to recommend paying for. On the other hand, I’m not even sure it’s going to be in theaters after this weekend, so this might be unnecessary anyhow.