As I understand it, a movie not having ‘tight’ writing doesn’t mean it has plotholes per say, just that it isn’t as efficient with its scenes/dialogue/plot as another movie.
Yeah, I recognize that and kind of wanted to address it originally, but my comment was already long.
I think a good example of flabby writing would be Anakin/Padme in AOTC, where they have a half-dozen scenes which don’t move their characters forward at all in the eyes of the audience. Another is the Exegol plot from TROS, where our characters go to four or five locations just to find a mcGuffin while barely developing as characters at all. But again, the problem is a lack of character progression per scene, not necessarily how flabby/nonsensical the plot becomes. Tight writing, in this case, does not equal a tight plot. Fury Road has a simplistic, borderline stupid plot, but it packs so much character work into each scene that one would never call the writing flabby.
Nerrel’s video makes a similar argument, and I don’t really agree. At least not in principle. Just because you can cut out portions of the movie to get to the point, doesn’t mean you necessarily should.
Sometimes detours like what we have in TRoS can be used to add something meaningful to the story, or can have some memorable sequence. The problem with these scenes in TRoS isn’t that they could be cut, it’s that what they add isn’t interesting or memorable or important at all. The problem with AotC and RotS’s similar scenes is that they don’t really add anything at all.
I think the fact that TRoS isn’t criticized for dragging, but the exact opposite, having a ridiculously frantic pace, kind of shows this. And that’s also where I agree with Nerrel more, these scenes shouldn’t be cut because they’re unnecessary, but because their screentime can be lent to something else, or even just to let the movie chill tf out.