I enjoyed it. It might not have been very deep or challenging, but stylish and fun counts for something. Where it suffers is in coherency, tightness, and storytelling efficiency - which I suspect is from a moving target of meddling and reshoots pushing it over time and budget and having these pieces re-massaged into a movie. By its own internal logic I think it makes sense, but certainly could have been better.
Reviews such as I read for JA suggest to me that their criticisms about movies rely mostly upon preconceived expectations. Like when people dismiss a work as “laughable”. Yet they didn’t enjoy it because it was not “supposed to be” laughable. Supposed by whom, I wonder? Anyway, there was a lot of detail to the production to geek out on.
I strongly suspect someone pulled the plug on the budget and schedule at some too-late point, and they had to cobble together a movie out of what they had. There are definitely the elements of a through-line of a plot there, albeit one with enormous gaps. It doesn’t surprise me at all that they started with a 600-page script. What’s a wonder is that they weren’t obliged to whittle that script down to a manageable size before starting shooting. George Lucas (circa 1975) had to do that. The exploding Death Star at the end of A New Hope was originally supposed to be the end of the whole trilogy (which is why it still happens at the end of Return of the Jedi since he couldn’t be arsed to think of a new climax), but when he felt certain that he’d only get one shot to make one Star Wars movie, he put all his best eggs into a single script-basket, and did it properly so that A New Hope still works perfectly well as a standalone movie.
If the Wachowskis started principal photography with a shooting script under 150 pages, I’ll eat my hat. I simply can’t imagine the cuts would be so hatchety if they planned all along to release a single 2-hour movie.
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