Still super gorgeous but we gave up about halfway through its 2h running time, it felt like we’d already been watching it for at least 2h at that point. It is still probably *the* prettiest space opera ever made but it really just never managed to make us give a shit about its characters or conflicts.

Really it felt like trying to watch the Utena movie coming in cold: a recapitulation of a lengthy series, made with the expectation that it would be seen by folks who’d watched all four seasons and already knew the characters well. (Supposedly JA’s original script was like 1k pages?)

Or maybe it felt like “what if George Lucas blew his immense fortune on making his script of ‘The Journal Of The Whills’, from before several dozen other people did the rewrites that turned it into ‘Star Wars’.”

There is also probably some interesting thought to be found in comparing this film’s tale of Evil Archons Who Plan To Harvest All Of Earth’s Humans with The Matrix’ tale of Evil Robots Who Use Humanity As Batteries but properly doing that would involve a close watching of about 9h of the Wachowskis’ particular brand of really pretty visuals, flat character handling, and lengthy infodumps, and that sounds like torture to me.