January 23, 2006

Is Kong king?

We watched "King Kong" a couple of days ago. I wanted to write about the movie then but other entries intervened :p However, I’ve been reading a couple of other reviews of the movie since then and they, to say the least, were rather gushing. Since I was bored to death (and annoyed) by most of the movie, I decided to go ahead and present my opinion of the movie.

I have not seen the original though I know it has cult status. I had a basic idea of what the story line of the original was but I had never considered the fact that the movie was more horror than action/adventure. So I went into this version of "King Kong" expecting an action/adventure and received a mishmash of horror, romance, action and adventure. Of course, that’s not a fault of the movie. I don’t fault them for the mixture. But I do fault them for not making any of it actually work for me :p

I was in actuality on the edge of my seat till the ship got to Skull Island. The story was gripping till then and while I did know that they’d get to Skull Island eventually, I still was kept wondering as to what would happen next. But once they got to Skull Island, it was mostly downhilll from that point on – in fact, I believe I actually yawned a few times through the rest of the movie :p It was just a lot of (unnecessary to me) footage of Kong running through the jungle clutching Ann in its paws like a rag doll (let’s not even go into how she survived Kong’s grip and the break-neck hand movements) and way too many instances of strange creatures popping up and getting bashed all across the landscape by Kong.

I liked the performances of quite a few of the actors but Naomi Watts annoyed the heck out of me. Somebody wrote that you could see a range of emotions on her face. But to be honest, all I could see were two buck teeth that would have put both Bugs Bunny and Chip ‘n’ Dale combined to shame :p I kid you not, in all of her shots, all you can see of her mouth are two teeth, try it and see if I’m wrong 🙂 And the screaming, oh, the screaming! I know that the role of "Ann Darrow" is supposed to be a screamer but boy, couldn’t they tone it down a bit? She screams and the whole island seems to hear it. Heck, at one point she screams on the island and the people on the ship seem to hear it. I’ve heard of suspension of belief but they are to need anti-gravity lifts to suspend belief like that!

They say that Peter Jackson was initially unable to make the movie back around 1996 but the studios pulled the plug on the project. He was only able to make the movie after the success of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy assured him he-can-do-no-wrong status. If the failure of "Lord of the Rings" would have assured that we’d be spared "King Kong", no matter how much I liked LotR, I wish it had tanked :p

Tags: , ,
Posted by Fahim at 7:39 am  |  No Comments