Not necessarily because the story of Mr. Ward's career is so well known (his most famous bouts, in particular his three extraordinary meetings with Arturo Gatti in 2002 and 2003, do not fall within the movie's scope), but rather because the shape of the narrative recalls so many other fight movies.
On the other hand, whatever motives of financing may have inhibited the movie's scope, and whatever other practicalities may reduce its scale, the question isn't just one of money and studios but of psychology, not just one of production but also one of distribution.
There was pressure to write more caper movies and bigger scope movies.
Some of those old black-and-white movies have scope and size.
Travers's dreams of becoming a famous writer were realized because of Disney's movie, but its scope eclipsed everything else that she had or would achieve.
Fundamentally, You Only Live Twice is a big movie: it has scope and size that few films, even the Bonds that followed, have matched.
But as the movie widens its scope, it evokes the ugly flip side of nature on a leash: strip malls, fast-food outlets, environmental destruction, the uprooting of stable communities and the Disneyfication of history.
The movie expands the scope across the Atlantic, detailing the chaotic run-up to an Iraq-like war with all the bullying, incompetence, cowardice and manipulation that most likely got us into the real one.
Rather, what lends the movie its vast scope and its deep resonance is the exquisite and tragic psychological insight on which it runs and the brilliant simplicity with which the Dardenne brothers realize it.
Kubrick's drive to show the entire arc of human life ("from ape to angel," as Kael dismissively put it) meant that he was making a special-effects movie of radical scope and ambition.
