King Kong
In 1933 New York, an overly ambitious movie producer coerces his cast and hired ship crew to travel to mysterious Skull Island, where they encounter Kong, a giant ape who is immediately smitten with leading lady Ann Darrow.
Directed by
Peter Jackson
Genres
Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi, Thriller
Cast
Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann, Colin Hanks, Andy Serkis, Evan Parke, Jamie Bell, Lobo Chan, John Sumner, Craig Hall, Kyle Chandler, Willians Johnson, Mark Hadlow, Geraldine Brophy
With the technology available for special effects, this could have been a great movie. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Sadly, this movie just proves the point that good effects do not a good movie make. It was certainly a disaster (of a) movie.
What happened here is that a film with enough plot to last for the time of the original was stretched out to try fill 3 hours of screen time, and the result is disastrous. In addition, it’s pretty clear that CGI nerds and video game designers had way too much input into this atrocity.
I could provide details of no less than 10 scenes that were totally irrelevant to the movie (but that would provide some spoilers for those that want to see the movie). In addition scenes that didn’t need to be in the movie, nearly every scene ran about twice as long as necessary.
If you removed all this irrelevant nonsense, what would remain might not have been that bad. It would probably be quite good, in fact. Sadly, it was left in. It’s hard to imagine how insufferable a DVD “Director’s Cut” could be.
On the positive side, Naomi Watts was excellent, as was Jack Black. The acting in general was a positive, no real complaints there. And the animation of Kong himself was excellent. Very well done.
Sadly though, very little of the movie involved acting. It was all about making it a big video game and putting in all the effects. The effects are not themselves the movie, they are there to support the movie!
To summarize, there were a lot of good pieces, but there were also a lot of bad ones. Ultimately too many were used, and a lot of them did not belong.