So there we were, opening day, in the theater 30 minutes early, tickets in hand. We went to a 5:20 showing and found no line and no difficulty getting a good seat; the theater was maybe 10% full once the film started, though I'd imagine the prime time showings are doing better business. Before the film though, while Malaya saved us good seats and I paced around the lobby, killing time, avoiding the horrible pre-movie pop music, and doing my filial duty by chatting a bit with dad, I kept thinking one thing; let it be good.
I wouldn't have turned down masterpiece, and I would have been overjoyed with great. I wasn't considering that it might suck, but I'd skimmed a lot of reviews, and while most of them liked or loved the film (
84% 117/139 good, 7.8 average on RT), almost all that didn't said the same thing. Brilliant, but too long, overdone, bloated, etc.
Three+ hours later, after cheering and laughing and even tearing up a bit, I hate to say it, but I have to be honest. I agree with the detractors. It's a brilliant film, full of unbelievable moments, and it's well-directed, and well-written. There's just too much of it. I couldn't point to any individual scenes of more than 30 seconds that could be cut entirely, but the whole picture just drags, and loses momentum even as everything on the screen is at least good.
To the scores:
King Kong, 2005
Script/Story: 7
Acting/Casting: 8
Action: 9
Humor: 7
Horror: NA
Eye Candy: 10
Fun Factor: 8
Replayability: 6
Overall: 6
My scores don't remotely average out, and that's not an accident. As I said in the intro, all of the individual elements of the film are good or great. It's just that the whole is less than the sum of the parts, mostly because it just goes on too long. And I'm quite disappointed by that, and my reaction. Lots of critics seem to have loved the whole thing, and I very much wanted to join them. I couldn't though, and Malaya was far more bored than I, nearly nodding off several times as things dragged on.
I'm torn on a number of the scores, too. Script/Story most of all, since I liked the script, and the story is epic. The dialogue is great, the characters are all interesting, and the storyline is a classic. I'd have given it a 9 without any debate if the film had been 2 hours long. As it was though, I'm tempted to drop this score to about a 5, since I've got to blame something for the bloat, and the overlong 2nd and 3rd acts are the prime culprits.
I also have to mention how great the special effects were, especially Kong and his interactions with Ann Darrow. A few of his finger pokes and the times he picks her up are a bit fake, and the humans and dinosaurs don't quite interact during one long stampede/trample scene, but most of the rest is A+ quality. Kong especially. I didn't think they could improve on Gollum just 2 years later, but damn the monkey looked good. I would have sworn 90% of the face and body shots were real life ape footage, edited into the film, and the backgrounds Kong is acting in are so perfectly-rendered that they look completely real too. I often caught myself wondering how they could make the CG ape look so perfect in the jungle as he knocked over trees and such, until I remembered that the ape and the jungle and the dinosaurs and rocks and trees and waterfalls were all CG, and that I should have been looking at the tiny human figures, the only reality in site, to see if they were cleanly composited into the image.
Overall, I had no trouble believing it was really a giant ape, and a lot of that suspension of disbelief was thanks to Naomi Watts' performance. She's easily knocked Frodo and Sam with Gollum out of the top spot in human to CG acting. She's great in her role; totally believable in her dozens of reaction shots to various special effects, and her emotions for and warmth towards the ape are completely believable.
The film can be roughly divided into thirds. The first hour takes place in New York and on the ocean, as Carl Denham (Jack Black is enjoyable and perfect in the role, the first film work I've ever seen of his.) faces the ruin of his film and career and desperately tries to find a writer, an actress for his film, and a way to escape New York before the movie financers can arrest him. The scenes of the city during the Great Depression are fine, Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) is great, Adrian Brody's character is great, and so are all of the supporting characters in New York and on the boat. Honestly, I enjoyed the first hour the most, even though there isn't any action or special effects or giant apes, etc. Peter Jackson can definitely write a script and direct it without the crutch of action or elves to keep things interesting.
The second hour is pretty much non-stop action and special effects, all taking place on Skull Island. Here we see dinosaurs, giant bugs, the massive King Kong, creepy murderous natives, and the most amazing large scale special effects I've ever seen. It's also the best set design I've ever seen, and if I could go explore Skull Island tomorrow I would be on a plane tonight. There is nothing but impossibly gorgeous scenery in the jungles, ancient stone temple ruins, dark tunnels, rotting forests, and so on. If I had not seen all the behind the scenes stuff on KongisKing.net, I would never have suspected they didn't shoot 95% of it out in some incredible jungle somewhere, rather than all in a studio, with extensive CG work. It's just about flawless.
The action on the island is great, in several set pieces. Unfortunately, they're basically microcosms of the film. There are too many of them, they run too long, and they're not really required by or in service of the plot. They're the "and hilarity ensues" type of thing, with PJ larding in more and more action just because no one stopped him from doing so. None of the scenes are bad, they are just unnecessary and redundant. Remember the scene where Legolas kills the oliphant all by himself in the big battle in
Return of the King? It was awesome and funny with Gimli's, "That still only counts for one!" remark, and because it punctuated a great battle scene. Now imagine that after that, Legolas did basically the same thing to a second oliphant, and then a third, and then an even bigger oliphant with orcs on top of it, and then a flying dragon, and then, and then... I never thought I'd say that there could be too many great action scenes in a film, but that's pretty much what happens.
The third hour takes place back in NYC, with the huge broadway show of the ape in chains, his inevitable escape and rampage and reunion with the girl, and his tragic last stand atop what was then the tallest building in the world. It's more good stuff, though I was fidgety during the long, long build up to the broadway show, and then once Kong is rampaging there are quite a few scenes of him doing it, and doing it. They seem to be atop the Empire State Building for a good half hour too, and while PJ didn't revisit his "five endings are better than one" work from RotK, the final dying and sad goodbye seemed to go on damn near forever. I was crying through most of it, moved by the tragedy and the beauty of it, but eventually enough is enough.
The second and third hour were also handicapped, for me at least, by the fact that I knew how the movie turned out. Since I think almost everyone else does too, the lack of suspense is a problem. Everyone knows they find Skull Island, natives steal the girl, Kong takes her, the movie guys rescue her and capture the ape and take him back to NYC before he busts out and climbs up the Empire State Building and biplanes come to shoot him down, and so on. If someone somehow didn't know that, I think
King Kong would be an enormously-entertaining movie, since there would be constant suspense and surprise. As it was I didn't get that caught up in some of the action, since I knew how it was going to turn out, and I wanted the plot to continue.
I enjoyed the first hour the most since I didn't know what was going to happen next, and there was always something new happening, even though nothing even approached the spectacle of later events. I knew they'd end up on the boat heading for Skull Island, but I enjoyed meeting all of the characters, enjoyed the performances by the actors (Jack Black and the maniacal gleam in his eye most of all), and wasn't bored a bit. It wasn't until they started running through one long action sequence after another that things bogged down, and they action sequences were great, both technically and by appearance.
My hope is that I'll like the film more on a second viewing. That won't be for a while, not until the DVD, but I liked the first 2 LotR films far more when I saw them for a second time and then even more on the extended edition DVDs, so there familiarity bred greater appreciation. I knew most of the plots of those films too, and spent much of my first viewing (unintentionally) analyzing how things were happening and comparing the movies to the books, which clearly sapped my enjoyment. Whether King Kong, which I knew far less about than the LotR books, will equally improve with subsequent viewings remains to be seen. I sure hope so, though, since I feel left out after my lukewarm reaction to a film with so much potential to be loved.
