Review of WrestleMania 36

First of all, the lack of a crowd is disconcerting at first but you do gradually get used to it; the entire WWE roster deserves applause for making this experiment work as well as it did. With that said, there are too many matches to go through each one here, so I'll just focus on the (subjective) highlights, in chronological order: Kevin Owens and Seth Rollins have a solid "grudge match" which includes a memorable elbow drop from high up on the Wrestlemania sign; AJ Styles and the Undertaker face off in a unique, cinematic and very "meta" Boneyard match which succeeds, thanks to the setting and special effects, to make the Undertaker look more like an invincible, supernatural entity than most such attempts; the phenomenal Charlotte and the shining new star Rhea Ripley have a hard-fought match for the NXT women's title, and my absolute favorite of all, Cena and Bray Wyatt take part in one of the most bizarre segments (a "Firefly Fun House" match) that WWE has ever attempted, which boldly icorporates the attitudes of the fans (or rather the "smarks") towards John Cena into a surreal "storyline"; to use a classic cliche, I don't know what they were smoking when they made this, but I want some of that. It was brilliant. Other enjoyable stuff includes Garza & Theory vs. The Street Profits for the Raw Tag Team titles, which is fast-moving fun, and the 5-way elimination match for the Smackdown women's championship with Bayley, Sasha Banks, Lacey Evans, Naomi, and Tamina; all the women looked very good here (Lacey Evans was a positive surprise - and really hot), although I would prefer a different (possibly any different) winner. The triple-threat ladder match with John Morrison, Kofi Kingston and Jimmy Uso was full of impressive athleticism, but also too many awkward moments where one person would climb up the ladder ever....so....slowly, almost as if waiting for someone else to stop them; the Last Man Standing match between Edge and Randy Orton has a clever start and takes us on an extensive backstage tour, but goes on way, way too long and is hampered by the expected sloth-like pacing; you either like this type of match or you don't, there is no middle ground. Weirdly enough, the two worst matches of the night by far are the Universal (Braun Strowman vs. Goldberg) and the World Heavyweight (Brock Lesnar vs. Drew McIntyre) title matches; they are ridiculously short and feauture about three wrestling moves each. But overall, I would say the good matches outnumber the poor ones, and the show as a whole was a commendable effort under extremely difficult circumstances. A 7.5/10 on the whole.