I enjoyed Ordinal Scale

I watched it recently as the Dub finally became available.

A lot of Yuki Kajiura fans have felt her SAO stuff has been some of her weakest stuff.  But this movie had some tracks that blew me away, that's the Yuki Kajiura I know and love.

The climax of the movie a lot of Fanservice, which I mean (mostly) not in the perverted sense but in the Rogue One sense.  However I felt like it was earned and pretty awesome.

The thing that bugs me is purely a meta issue, that this wasn't adapted from one of the Light Novels but was a newly created in-between story.  They chose to save the next Light Novel for the next TV season of SAO.

I feel like a lot of Light Novel based Anime would be better served by being movies rather then TV shows.  Most TV Anime fit their serialized structure because they're adapted from a serialized source material like Manga, or were created for the TV format.

But most Light Novels are by that very definition not necessarily very large novels.  They may be telling a serialized story, but not in a a very episodic fashion.  With Haruhi for example I think Disappearance is the best Haruhi Anime, and the the 6 episodes based on the Melancholy Light Novel could have made a decent movie.

SAO is no different, much of the criticism of the first three arcs is predicated on how the stories feel dragged out in order to fill 12-14 episodes.

So getting a movie could have been a good chance to see if the film format would serve adapting them better, but instead we got an original story with no source material to compare it to at all.

However, given what I hear about the Light Novels, we might not have gotten so much Asuna if the movie had been based on one of them.