Ponderous, bloated, and disappointing.

Rating: 4/10 (4 November 2017)

I was disappointed. This film was just so boring. It seriously needed an editor with the intestinal fortitude to hold the director accountable for so much wasted time and aggressively cut out a lot of the interminable pauses and long lingering shots.
The story line was okay, and the film was not horrible in a "Phantom Menace" sense. But it was soooo slow and was flabby -- it should have been an hour shorter. The director and editor lacked any sense of self-discipline.
As we were watching it, I was thinking that the director had watched the original film and thought to himself, "This film has a few lingering face shots, a lot of heavy architecture, and some jarring sound effects. We need to kick that up by a couple orders of magnitude. Let's have an hour's worth of lingering shots that make 'Star Trek: The Motion Picture' look like 'Fast and Furious'; a bunch of nude statues in a permanent dust storm; and that dubstep track that my cousin recorded during his last meth binge playing over and over."
Why did the director spend a 10-minute segment on Joe having sex with a prostitute overlaid with a hologram? That scene could have taken 90 seconds to 2 minutes, tops, and still been just as impactful.
How much time was wasted watching Joe look at the tree? Or looking at the furnace where the wooden horse was hidden? Or with Princess Buttercup sitting in his apartment drinking, asking questions that added nothing to the story line?
Overall, it was ponderous, bloated, and boring. I love the original so much that I own multiple versions of it on Blu-Ray, whereas I will probably never watch the sequel again. It's not worth my time.
As my adieu, I give you the next-to-final scene as written by Dr. Seuss:
Look, Joe, snow. Snow, Joe, snow. The snow is slow. Joe is slow. The snow is on Joe. Woe is Joe. Joe sits in the snow. Joe is on the snow. He lays in the snow. Slow, slow, slow. The snow comes on. Joe is gone. All those moments will be lost in time, Like tears in rain.