No spoilers, but... God damn. What a shitshow. My meagre formal training and history in filmmaking comes crawling back out of my brain like a fucking bound demon yet again, to torture me with the horrid details of a failure of cinematic immersion. Not like Game of Thrones' botched final season, but it's own... Mangled thing. It still stuck its landing - barely, on Henry Cavill's soon-to-be-missed thighs - but sprayed blood and bone shards all over the judges all the way down...
Really poor editing, extremely rushed final changes in the month's delay, but the thing is, I can't tell why. Nothing seemed to change in the presented story in a way that aligned with real world happenings around casting. But the tell-tale signs of a last-minute change echo all throughout the three episodes - as deep as the themes themselves; when whole scenes can occur, and one is left wondering 'why did this happen, why did we see this, as part of this story? What did that intend to mean?', things have gone way down the tubes.
Was it really just so rushed? Contractual obligations, most likely, but goddamn. Not all of it can be blamed on the rushed changes, however... These last 3 episodes, there was definitely some issues way back in planning/production, IMO. Like, I literally paused an episode at one point, stepped away from the TV, stepped back, and asked my partner (who was similarly agape), "at what point, do you think, in preproduction, did the team behind this fail to convey anything they wanted to in this scene? Because my guess is storyboarding."
Absolutely stunning drop in quality, focus, and cohesion. Effects were WILDLY hit and miss. Continuity was ALL over the shop, both in chronology of shots and in cinematography. Some really rushed choreography. Some matching shots were colour graded so differently, I thought they were flashbacks. Just, extremely crunched - the kinds of edits I personally know to be 'fuck it, it's as good as it can be with time to render.' Yeesh.
And yet, this is intermixed with... Bog standard quality of the rest of the season - medium high quality on most fronts. It's... SO weird. I can see the decisions being made, cut to cut, ADR to badly covered ADR, incongruous cut to incongruous cut. It's... It's really painful. Especially E06.
