King Gong

If you're too young to get the Gong reference, don't worry about it...most folks that I know aren't.

So I stayed up late last night watching the Peter Jackson version of King Kong and can sum up the experience in 3 words (too bad he couldn't): long, superfluous, and long.

I had reasonably high hopes for this film given his previous successes with Lord of the Rings, coupled with the knowledge that it won some academy awards for visual effects. So much for that.

Here's a hint: using all of your footage does not a good movie (typically) make. It worked for the LOTR series, but those were new films based on an epic story. King Kong has been done before, and it's hardly a complex story: People find ape, ape finds girl, people rescue girl, people kill ape. The 1933 version of the film was about an hour and a half long. The 1976 version, about two hours. 2005? THREE FUCKING HOURS! Hello? It's the SAME story, where did the extra hour come from? I didn't know that inflation worked on time too.

The beginning of the movie was probably 45 minutes long and could have been cropped to 15. If that. The main body of the film, time spent on the island, was as long as the movie should have been in total. The ending, well, see the beginning. Honestly, when Kong started climbing the Empire State Building it was about 2:00 AM and I fell asleep. I woke up again at 2:20 and guess what? He was STILL on the Empire State Building. For the love!

The general acting was par, but I really hated Jack Black in the role of Carl Denham. Not that he didn't play the part well, actually the opposite, but to me, Jack Black just isn't "that guy", at all, so I hated his portrayal. I typically hate Adrian Brody, but this time around I kind of liked him. And then there's Naomi Watts...a few particular scenes made her my crush of the day.

I really liked the island natives, they looked awesome. Influence from Jackson's work on LOTR was totally apparent here. They had a human meets kong meets ork look to them that was just rad.

Finally, the visual effects. I'm a big CGI fan, so I was hoping to see some cool things here, and I did, but for the most part I'd give it a solid average. To their credit, the folks that modeled Kong did an amazing job. Up close, he looked perfect and was totally believable. But when he was in motion in a wide shot, absolutely not. Which is the opposite of what you'd think. Props to the Kong/T-Rex fight animators though, that was probably the best part of the movie. The real bad stuff were things like the Brontosaurus Pile-up, which just came off totally comical to me. Really, I laughed and laughed, and I don't think that was intended. The scene with the bugs was just dumb, it's like the animators had a bucket full of bugs and accidentally spilled them all over. Why have 5 when we can have 5,000,000? But what really did it in for me was when they actually animated Naomi juggling some rocks. Dumb, dumb, dumb, DUMB!

Part of the problem could be that I also watched HP: Goblet of Fire again this weekend. The CGI work in that film is just astounding (see the dragon scenes). I can't believe that King Kong beat out HP for visual effects. Damn crime that is.

All in all, that's 3 hours worth of quality gaming time I'll never get back.

Sorry PJ, 2 out of 5 Nerds for you