King Kong

The film wouldn't be half as good without the introductory hour where you actually get to know the characters that are about to be killed. I agree with Jackson that one of the biggest problems with these types of film is that they can be all about the monster/CGI and you ignore the people involved.

I like the fact that you see Jack Black's Denham slowly getting more crazily obsessive throughout. I like that they show you how bad the Depression was and what desperation drove these people to the lengths they went.

I thought the first part of the film was a beautifully done an interesting character piece with wonderful design (30's New York was so well created) and a storyline that set the time period perfectly. The half is the action one and made more satisfying because I understood and cared about the characters more rather than them just being ape fodder.
 
I thought the movie could have been better .The lead actors & actress were weak ! The lead actor reminded me of Inspector Gadjet so i couldnt take it serious
 
Video + it and only watched half of it . The captain of the ship looks like Liam Niesson his he any relation , son or brother maybe?
 
It IS a good film for the most part, but it really did need to be trimmed back in places, unlike Lord of the Rings which deserves the long running time due to how much is going on. In Kong there are too MANY moments where Peter thinks he's building tension by having pauses and slow motion that go on forever, but in order to do that successfully you need to make good characters and character scenes, but the ONLY character that's any good is Jack Black as Denham. So the viewers just want things to move on faster.

The effects are, of course, AMAZING, particularly the digital and physical recreation of 1933 New York, and Kong himself, but here we have the case of the effects being much better than the story and performances themselves (the Star Wars prequels were like this. I would definitely say that Kong is Peter Jackson's Star Wars prequel nightmare).

Adrian Brody and Naomi Watts aren't a good pairing in Kong. In fact, Brody is just miscast and shouldn't have been in this at all. Naomi does a good job but she's wasted because all she gets to do is stare in silence up at a giant ape for most of the movie. In Peter's 1996 Kong script Ann had an actual story where she was the daughter of an archeologist, and Jack was a WWI fighter pilot (IMO those characters and many of Peter's ideas at that time were just STOLEN by Universal for The Mummy which came out a year or so later!!)
 
i really enjoyed this. Maybe a tad long but had a strong story (although i knew the ending :( ;) ) and the special effects where second to none!
 
I've come to the conclusion that the opening New York scenes are great but the voyage itself should have been much shorter with some of the scenes that take place on the ship happening on the island instead, this would have stopped the pace of the film slowing down.
 
I watched this last night - what a long film - nearly 3 hours !
The special effects were great but I did think that it dragged on a bit towarRAB the end.
For such a huge island they certainly managed to find/hear each other quite easily.
 
Well that's monster movies for you mate. Its an historic convention in monster movies that the creature itself doesn't apepar for the first half of the movie. It happened in the original King Kong and so the new film is just keeping up the tradition.
 
I heard that the bug scene was included in the script for the original but it was too difficult to film so it was omitted. I think it's great that Peter Jackson reinstated it.
 
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