Peter Jackson‘s The Beatles: Get Back “is — or was — a movie I dreamed of seeing in theaters. Today, most music documentaries are streaming only, but the Beatles remain larger-than-life. They turned the entire world into a community, and still have the power to turn an audience into a congregation. If the Beatles aren’t worthy of the big screen, I don’t know who is.

“But that’s no longer going to happen. Now we’ll all sit at home, watching the Beatles separately, on three separate nights. Beyond that, I’m compelled to ask: Six hours? It’s clear that Jackson fell in love with this material and was eager to give us more of it, which sounds like a generous impulse. But six hours of Get Back is a lot of Get Back.

“In general, Jackson tends to be dominated by his go-big-or-go-home side, which first showed itself in the Lord of the Rings trilogy (which I think of, in my snarkier moments, as nine hours of folks riding through the woods), then in the bloat of King Kong, and then in the jaw-dropping grandiosity with which he inflated The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien’s slenderest Middle-earth novel, into three damn epic movies. Do you sense a trend here?

“I’m not prejudging The Beatles: Get Back, but I do have a trepidation, one that I feel justified in saying out loud. My fear is that Jackson, in chopping the Get Back footage down to a gargantuan six hours, hasn’t done the disciplined and demanding work of editing, of shaping, of putting an exquisitely honed movie together. My fear is that he’ll be giving us not a Beatles documentary but a Beatles document dump.” — from Owen Gleiberman‘s “The Beatles: Get Back Is Now a Six-Hour Mini-Series. So Why Does It Feel Like More Might Be Less?“