I haven't watched the whole opening ceremony yet, only parts of it when it aired live, some quick 20 min overviews online, and comments here, which I agree with. I watched some of the closing ceremony, and again, I had the same feeling about it; what the hell is that? Some more ugly plastic-looking and Cheesecloth cheap-looking costumes/outfits, an ulgy choreography, Billy Hellish...
(the typo I made in her last name is voluntary, and I explained to my daughter to avoid those types of destructive artists)
I watched the closing ceremony last night out of curiosity, as it aired live on french tv. All I saw was a severe lack of culture, art, imagination & aesthetics from un-creative wanna-bes. And I did not see Lucifer, just a bug.
It was all rather ugly & non-sensical. The people posting above are giving the "ceremony" way more meaning or credit than it deserves.
This sums up exactly what I thought.
Now, since everyone here seems to agree with the same opinion of the games, I looked up online to watch previous opening ceremonies to compare, because I seem to remember that they used to be beautiful and fun to watch when I was young.
Those are the ones I watched, with some fast forwarding of course, and indeed, they were much nicer.
1992 Albertville: Circus inspired like Cirque du Soleil, with a modern twist
https://olympics.com/en/video/albertville-1992-opening-ceremony
2008 Beijing: Beautiful, aesthetic, and impressive display, proudly showing Chinese culture and Folklore.
2010 Vancouver: Beautiful and aesthetic, mostly a tribute to the First Nations.
At 1:50:00, they seem to depict La Chasse-galerie, also known as "The Bewitched Canoe" or "The Flying Canoe", a popular French-Canadian tale of lumberjacks from camps working around the Gatineau River who make a deal with the
devil, a variant of the Wild Hunt. Its best-known version was written by Honoré Beaugrand (1848–1906).
I'm not sure why they brought up that theme in the opening ceremony, especially since it's more a Quebec tale, and the folkloric costumes have been "
punked" for unknown reasons. Seems like the "devil/hell" theme started getting inserted more often by 2010, but they were still subtle about it. Later there is a guy flying over wheat fields... Whatever that means.
When I have some more time, I will look up those too just for fun:
2012 Londre, Angleterre
2014 Sochi, Russie
2016 Rio Janeiro, Brazil
2018 Pyeongchang, South Korea
2020 Tokyo, Japan