I was thinking about this too. In the manga, it feels like it happens very quickly. In the movie, it was so extended that it made me think of the end of the 90s Season 1. Mars would have lit her ass up!

If they had composed the scene for it to happen pretty quickly, then the choke hold would have made more sense.
Because of the immediacy, it also feels more cathartic, because you know others have died and you expect Mars and Venus to die, only to be relieved that they are fine, only for Galaxia to step in out of nowhere and kill them. It's brutal. This is again a problem of how one interprets the manga when adapting it to animation. If you decide the scene can take time--like they can really run to Sailor Moon, rather than them just expressing immediate relief--you risk making the scene come off as silly. Personally, I feel like composing the scene where they both turn and thank Sailor Moon and are interrupted mid-turn and mid-sentence would have conveyed the same feeling of shock in the manga.