Watching this, it feels like a twelve-year-old wrote the screenplay by tacking together scenes that might look cool without giving any thought to what the dialog would sound like when spoken out loud by human beings. Ian McShane does his best to sound convincing, while some of the other actors don't seem to see the point in even doing that and it's hard to blame them. There are plot holes throughout and segments that make little-to-no sense and add nothing to the story, although would maybe look neat if the effects were any good. The whole thing generally feels like someone slapped together at least four or five stories and tried to turn them into a coherent whole, which wouldn't surprise me, although I don't know enough about the comics to say for certain.
I'm not sure where to place the blame for the awful pacing, but the movie is just unrelenting. There are times when things should wind down, but then it's just more noisy stuff happening. For example, at one point a character is in need of specialized medical attention and they find out it'll be a fairly-long and "treacherous" trek to get it. The character is then cured within 1-2 minutes of runtime, the trek portion being a few seconds of that, then we jump straight into some exposition, then we jump straight back to what we were doing before, presumably after a long and treacherous trek back that also happens instantaneously. To get an idea of how jarring this feels, imagine if Gandalf told Frodo about what it would take to destroy the ring and the next scene was at Mount Doom.
The direction is mostly just odd, and I have no idea if it's because the director couldn't figure out what was happening in the script or because someone was meddling with his work.
Finally, the CGI monsters look terrible. There are some impressive uses of practical effects, but the transitions between those and their CGI counterparts are blatant.
I'm not sure where to place the blame for the awful pacing, but the movie is just unrelenting. There are times when things should wind down, but then it's just more noisy stuff happening. For example, at one point a character is in need of specialized medical attention and they find out it'll be a fairly-long and "treacherous" trek to get it. The character is then cured within 1-2 minutes of runtime, the trek portion being a few seconds of that, then we jump straight into some exposition, then we jump straight back to what we were doing before, presumably after a long and treacherous trek back that also happens instantaneously. To get an idea of how jarring this feels, imagine if Gandalf told Frodo about what it would take to destroy the ring and the next scene was at Mount Doom.
The direction is mostly just odd, and I have no idea if it's because the director couldn't figure out what was happening in the script or because someone was meddling with his work.
Finally, the CGI monsters look terrible. There are some impressive uses of practical effects, but the transitions between those and their CGI counterparts are blatant.