I enjoyed this, but it was practically begging to be a 3-hour epic. The pacing was just off, with characters seemingly just teleporting from place to place, and not really enough time developing the relationships between the characters to make me care as much as I should have by the end. I saw a couple of interviews where Gareth Edwards had talked about early cuts of the film being well over 4 hours long, and whilst I definitely don't think we needed it to be that long, I think it would have greatly benefited from at least another 30 minutes. There was just so much going on in terms of characters and world-building, and that meant that the just north of 2-hour runtime simply wasn't enough to make everything work as well as it perhaps could have.
The ending was underwhelming when it should have been very emotional, but there just hadn't been enough time to develop certain character relationships for it to really have the impact that it should have. The score and visuals were undoubtedly the high points of the film, and it's incredible what was achieved with the budget that they had compared to other sci-fi films of similar scope.
Review by ragreynoldsVIP 7BlockedParent2023-09-29T16:42:50Z
I enjoyed this, but it was practically begging to be a 3-hour epic. The pacing was just off, with characters seemingly just teleporting from place to place, and not really enough time developing the relationships between the characters to make me care as much as I should have by the end. I saw a couple of interviews where Gareth Edwards had talked about early cuts of the film being well over 4 hours long, and whilst I definitely don't think we needed it to be that long, I think it would have greatly benefited from at least another 30 minutes. There was just so much going on in terms of characters and world-building, and that meant that the just north of 2-hour runtime simply wasn't enough to make everything work as well as it perhaps could have.
The ending was underwhelming when it should have been very emotional, but there just hadn't been enough time to develop certain character relationships for it to really have the impact that it should have. The score and visuals were undoubtedly the high points of the film, and it's incredible what was achieved with the budget that they had compared to other sci-fi films of similar scope.