I recently watched the Borderlands movie and while it had its obvious faults, the biggest flaw in my opinion was the jarring pace that one scene would switch into the next. That movie had a short runtime so could easily have been extended to let each scene breathe a little more and I think that alone would have drawn people in the world building a lot better.
I do think with SciFi, the world-building aspect needs to be front and centre, otherwise it’s impossible to switch off the “well that couldn’t happen in real life” part of your brain.
The one thing I did think the prequel movies did well, perhaps the only thing, was how it painted a world where absolute greed allowed an environment for space-nazis to thrive. Though real life sadly demonstrates that corruption doesn’t need to happen in the shadows to succeed.
Watching the old movies today, I do think that the 70s films are too slow and 90s+ films too aggressive with cuts. Would be nice to balance, or have important scenes breathe while others get chopped. Most movies are too long these days as well.
The film itself was criticized as “Blade Crawler” back in the day.
Though I’m not disagreeing that culturally we have been on a steep downwards decline with regards to our attention span.
I watched the first Rambo very late, only about two years ago, and I was amazed at how much better the explosions look than in any movie I've seen in the past two decades. You can afford to actually show what's happening when it looks that good.
I've noticed a similar thing in martial arts movies. You can save a lot of effort and money with the quick, frantic editing. The alternative is that the choreography and cinematography have to be really on point. If you just shake the camera around a lot and do a cut every second, you can get away with amateurish fighters doing whatever, nobody will really notice.
Runtime = scene length * content
Hell, "The Hobbit" is 3 overlong movies.
While trends are that movies are, on average, getting slightly longer, there are as many exceptions to that rule as there are examples of it, not just in the present day but also in the past too. And it can vary from genre to genre.
Also movie serials were actually the norm in early cinema. This isn’t some new trend invented by Jackson.
Examples of how the distribution is actually extremely varied:
Cite required.
One of the examples I've seen goes something like: Wide shot of bank of elevators. Man walks up to elevator to push the button. Cut to close up of dial showing which floor the elevator is on showing the indicator moving back to first floor. A ding is heard indicating the elevator has arrived. Cut to wide shot showing doors opening, people exiting, man entering elevator. Cut to interior of elevator to see man choose floor and doors close. Now, you see the man walk to the elevator bank, hit the button, and then cut to the doors opening as man exits.