See, this is great- I love when people who have never gotten into a fight in their lives make comments about the verisimilitude of fighting in films. John Wick is unrealistic (but great, I will give it that), the Dark Knight is unrealistic, Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith is unrealistic. Real fights don't go smoothly. The person you fight doesn't always do exactly what you need to allow you to catch his arm as you come back around- I say all this because, as much as I know it was done more due to limitations affording high-priced fight choreographers and multiple takes, the occasional stunt misfire is appreciated. So, NO, we fighters don't know what you mean.
The problem here is some people forget to keep perspective when viewing a film of this size. This is not a big budget, multi production house effort, so you need to look at the money and resources, look at the final product and say "is the money on screen" and in this case, I think it is. They did a lot with a little. Granted, I think the story needed much more refinement and a proper 3 to 5 act structure, and characters needed to be defined better- I mean, the first half hour is introducing character after character, all of whom are killed minutes after one of our two protagonists meet them, but the production, as a whole, looks great!
Though, our protagonist... Yeesh! See, in the fantasy genre especially, we need a well defined protagonist (usually the human character) so that we can take this adventure with them and, by proxy, live the adventure ourselves. SAGA failed to distinguish which of the two leads we were meant to attach our ego to. Neither the male nor the female were bad actors, so don't think I'm knocking them, they did great with what they were given, but their characters did leave a lot to be desired. The actor can only bring so much charisma to any given role. It is up to the writer to craft those "save the cat" moments to get us to care for the lead, and this screenplay failed to do that. So the writing is the only thing I see that made this film seem sloppy.
The rest of it seems pretty solid. Acting, directing, cinematography, effects and music are all top of their game given the budget this film probably had. There were some amazing locations too, so location scout- A+. Film is a collaborative effort, and if these same people got together with a stronger screenplay, there's nothing they couldn't do.
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