I went and saw King Kong a couple weeks ago. I should have written about it then, but $7 Popcorn didn't exist yet.
So, King Kong, directed by Peter Jackson who of course directed 3 of my favorite movies...The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. In LotR, what stands out is how great the effects were. How seamlessly they worked themselves into the movie and how REAL all of the fantastical creatures looked. Saddly, this could not be recreated for King Kong. Sitting in the theatre, there were just too many times when a bad visual effect took me right out of the movie. All of a sudden I just was sitting there thinking about Jurassic Park and he good all of the dinosaurs looked and comparing the two movies and noticing how much better a 13 year old movie looked. Too often you noticed a computer effect and it looked cheezy.
Now, this isn't of itself enough to indict a movie. There have been some great movies with horrible effects. And that only shows the importance of story, acting and directing. In King Kong, the acting was pretty good. Jack Black was fine. Naomi Watts was good when she wasn't around the monkey. Adrien Brody was...fine. There were no real bad acting jobs. The acting was good. The story was not. And perhaps that is just a flaw going back to the 1933 original. I can accept that. But then there was the directing. Which left me with two questions:
How in the world do you make a pretentious monster movie?
Did the studio make you cut the make out scene between Naomi Watts and the giant monkey?
You can wrestle with that first one yourself, the second question though...come on! I haven't laughed at such a bad love story since Attack of the Clones. At least Watts and the Monkey had some chemistry together!
In the end, all I can say is that King Kong was almost worth what I paid to see it. The problem is, I saw it for free.
