MovieChat Forums > Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017) Discussion > People complaining about the runtime

People complaining about the runtime

posted 6 years ago by NonSequitur (44)
10 replies | jump to latest

I think they totally botched The Last Jedi - especially concerning Luke - but one thing I won't complain about is the running time. A new Star Wars SHOULD be an event, and immersing oneself in a fantasy world for two and a half hours shouldn't be a problem, granted that the story is good enough to support the length.

I've seen more and more complaining about film lengths these days. Demanding that grand stories be packed into 2 hours or less is arbitrarily limiting of deeper exploration of worlds and characters. The problem shouldn't be with the length, but rather how well the running time is used. A film shouldn't be automatically criticized for running longer than average.

With that said, they could have cut the entire casino planet and Harry Potter and the Racing Cat-Horses sequence and this particular film would have been marginally better for it.

[–] Frogarama (12942) 6 years ago

Apparently it even had to be trimmed down from 3 hours, so there are a lot of deleted scenes.

Not a very focused movie. Yes the Finn/Rose stuff either needed to go, or it needed to actually become important somehow instead of being its own little side-movie with its own story.

The war profiteering angle wasn't even utilized, it was mentioned and then ditched.

[–] MenacingBFF (4) 6 years ago

Setting Finn up in a new/different relationship by having them go through all of that together to become close, is the only other thing I can really think of. This gets used / mentioned more by the end as well.

[–] tollyfan33 (71) 6 years ago

it was important because made finn embrace his destiny

[–] Frogarama (12942) 6 years ago

And that's mostly to stop speculation of romance between him and Rey.

[–] tollyfan33 (71) 6 years ago

not after the hug that rey and finn shared at the end

[–] MenacingBFF (4) 6 years ago

Love triangle? Love square??

[–] Recognizer (386) 6 years ago

There's nothing wrong with a long movie per-se (cf. Castaway, Meet Joe Black, The Green Mile, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Schindler's List, to name a few), but there is something wrong if you notice how long it is while you're watching it, because that indicates that you're bored, and if you're bored, then the director has failed.

For all of the aforementioned films, I didn't notice the passage of real time even once, but all these films are over 3 hours long. I can't say the same for TLJ. Quite the opposite. I was acutely aware of time passing on at least 3 occasions during the film. By the time it got to the AT-AT attack on Crait, I actually thought, for the first time ever in a SW film: "Isn't it over yet?"

[–] janelsenor (2042) 6 years ago

It was too long. Not only that, it still feels like they tried to cram too much in to that bloated running time....

[–] Recognizer (386) 6 years ago

Yes, they definitely took the kitchen sink approach. I found myself mentally fatigued by it about 3/4 of the way through the film.

[–] Jes' Sayin' (5992) 6 years ago

It should have ended when the rebels got behind the big garage door. With an action-adventure film it's important not to overstay your welcome.