I went to see King Kong last night and I really enjoyed the movie for the most part. Peter Jackson has really done a good job in the movie as a whole. However there were some things about the movie that I liked and other stuff that I didn't like.
The first thing was putting Jack Black in a non comedy roll. I like Jack Black and I think he is fairly funny but it just didn't do it for me to see him as a weasly businessman. He does too much emoting and funny face stuff to be taken seriously for this kind of roll. I kind of wished they used someone like Paul Giamatti in this roll. I think Giamatti would have really done a great job as an oily salesman type of guy. I know this movie needed some comic relief but Giamatti has pretty good comic timing and would have nailed the role IMO. The rest of the characters were pretty decent and I liked Naomi Watts quite a bit. She had a very real damsel in distress quality that shown through in the movie.
The love story did not work for me though. Watts and Brody have almost no chemistry together and I couldn't tell why she fell in love with him. It really seemed like one of those things where it says "characters fall in love" on King Kong Script page 21 and the audience needs to take it for granted. It would have been cool to make it more old school and have the two in-love characters not even share a kiss until the very end of the movie. Just keep building up the tension and finally we get the payoff at the very end.
I also had a little trouble suspending my disbelief in the parts where she is running around in bare feet on the jungle floor. She would have been cut and bleeding in no time flat. I guess they figured that if you can believe an island full of giant beasts and dinosaurs you can believe that a barefooted woman can run around in a jungle with no problems.
King Kong really looked phenominal and again Andy Serkis does a great job of making a CGI only character come to life. The audience feels bad for King Kong and I forgot that he was all done on a computer very early on in the movie. Too bad Lucas didn't let Serkis play Jar Jar Binks when Phantom came out. Maybe we would have felt something other then abject hatred when we saw him on the screen.
The CGI was again shows that ILM can not even touch WETA when it comes to effects. Almost every CGI thing looked as real as they could have gotten it. It really felt like you were in 1930s New York and on Skull Island. Jackson is very good at these kinds of immersive films and this one is no exception.
All in all the movie was a good one and is one of the better remakes of a classic film out there. However this film was not a classic in my eyes. It is a great piece of work but I think Jack Black ruined it for me. I know that comedians have made the jump from comedy to drama but Black does not seem ready yet. With Giamatti in that roll however, this movie would have been outstanding and would have bordered on classic in my eyes. Well I'm glad Jackson could get this one out of his system so he can start working on the Hobbit. That is probably the film that I am the *most* looking forward to in the coming years.
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