I feel similarly about Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. It's three hours long and slowly-paced, but IMO it would be unfair to criticize because the pace is part of the style and to make more cuts would compromise the style. Plus, it's otherwise edited pretty well, and it's hard for me to imagine what could have been cut out of the film. It's my least favorite Stanley Kubrick film, but I can still appreciate and respect it, and IMO it's a very good film - but will only appeal to people with a certain taste.
I've never seen War & Peace, but if the acting, directing, and script are that good, but you don't like the pacing, then I would argue then perhaps it's still not the actual length of the film but the pacing - and I'd also argue that maybe it's not the pacing that's necessarily bad, just another matter of taste. Then again, I think adapting books into movies are a tricky thing. Note that the movies I mentioned before are either wholly original (Inception & Heat), not directly based on one book (The Dark Knight), or loosely based on a book (Goodfellas). When you adapt a longer book, I'm of the opinion that you simply have to heavily deviate from the source material to conform to the film format, or you simply have to go the TV route if you want to preserve every one of the book's details.
I've never seen War & Peace, but if the acting, directing, and script are that good, but you don't like the pacing, then I would argue then perhaps it's still not the actual length of the film but the pacing - and I'd also argue that maybe it's not the pacing that's necessarily bad, just another matter of taste. Then again, I think adapting books into movies are a tricky thing. Note that the movies I mentioned before are either wholly original (Inception & Heat), not directly based on one book (The Dark Knight), or loosely based on a book (Goodfellas). When you adapt a longer book, I'm of the opinion that you simply have to heavily deviate from the source material to conform to the film format, or you simply have to go the TV route if you want to preserve every one of the book's details.
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