Review of World on a Wire

I recognize that World on a Wire is a well made and intellectually stimulating film. However, three-and-a-half hours is too much Fassbinder. Too much of his roving camera and its heavy crash zooms and methodical tracking pans. Too much of his icy compositions of characters reflected off of mirrors, reflected off of mirrors (we get it Rainer.. we're dealing with infinite realities). What could have been a taught and gripping philosophical sci-fi/thriller, winds up instead as a flamboyant, inflated exercise in mannerism, an exercise which becomes more laborious with each passing minute. I much prefer the other films I've seen from him (namely Maria Braun and Petra von Kant), which look and feel exactly like this one, only that they are executed in half the time and with an undercurrent of emotional import that is sorely missing here. In retrospect, all I needed was the first half and the final twenty minutes, thereby sparing me from the tiresome accentuation of plot and the increasingly cloying style.