Interesting movie but no longer relevant

Rating: 8/10 (14 January 2016)

As a historian, I thought this movie was excellent and covered a time of extreme secrecy and mistrust. Its good that movies of this nature and subject still get made.
However this movie presents a problem, its about a subject that is no longer relevant in the modern age, sure there will always be mutual mistrust of both East (Russia, China, N Korea) and West (NATO Countries) but the art of human espionage is over. This is not a critical analysis of the movie, but considering an article I read about 18 months ago when Spielberg was criticising Hollywood and the movie industry as a whole for releasing too many sequels and CGI blockbusters, does he really think there is a market for movies like this? There was an interesting post about a 20+ year old who took his girlfriend to see this movie and they enjoyed it, he commented everyone else in the audience was older. This is great to hear and read because it proves that there IS still an audience for this kind of subject.
That being said, as much as this story was interesting and the acting good by the always dependable Tom Hanks as well as it being nice to see the excellent Sebastian Koch, I felt the movie dragged so much that I kept looking at my watch wondering when it was over. I have noticed that I have done this for the last few of Spielberg's movies. There is no doubt that he was once a great filmmaker but his editing has become appalling. I would have liked to have seen more of the conditions faced by the citizens of East Germany and less about the US pilot and the training he went through as that didn't really add to the movie.
I think if in future Spielberg is going to make further movies like this he need to make sure he edits carefully, make the story entertaining and not long and boring. Unfortunately in my opinion with the exception of the Martian, this is where we now find Ridley Scott, making long and boring movies when really they are exceptional movies just poorly edited.