King Kong Review

[alobear]

I didn't go to see this film with any great sense of anticipation, and it both impressed and disappointed me. Some of the dialogue at the beginning was a little clunky and I will shamefully admit to being distracted occasionally by Adrien Brody's nose, but the visuals were amazing and most of the action was edge of the seat (or even hiding behind the hands) stuff.

Jamie Bell turned up as the cabin boy, which was interesting, as I had just rewatched Billy Elliott the day before. I wonder if he's kept up his dancing, since he has neither the looks nor the acting talent (reasonable though he is in both departments) to make it really big in Hollywood and it would be a shame for him to discard the thing that really makes him stand out, in exchange for a mediocre career in film.

Andy Serkis clearly enjoyed himself tremendously as the comedy Popeye-lookalike cook, though his performance as Kong far outshone anything else in the film.

The slow build-up was effective, the characters were attractive (but flawed, which is always good), the sense of adventure was palpable - and then they reached the island. Then we had frenzied natives, stampeding diplodoci, snarling raptors, a trio of hungry T-rexes, giant centipedes (which got a far bigger reaction from the audience than the dinosaurs - humans are just programmed to be scared of insects, I guess), giant mosquitoes, really quite horrible slug monsters, spiders and vampire bats. Each and every one of these encounters was excellently rendered and excitingly shot - but all of them were way too long. The whole jungle sequence was way too much, leaving me losing interest long before the city climax.

Then I was completely undone by a brief moment on a frozen pond, which had me in tears and kept me hooked right to the top of the Empire State Building. But one too many passes by the biplanes took me off the boil again and diminished the impact of the ending.

Overall, the film was very good. However, Peter Jackson has fallen into the J K Rowling trap and got rather carried away. He was allowed to remake his favourite film and was given pots of cash to do it with, and nobody was going to say no to what he wanted. So, he threw everything he could think of into the film and just made it too damn long. The original 1933 version was 1 hour and 40 minutes - did Mr Jackson really need to *double* the running time to retell it? I think not. An hour could easily have been cut from the jungle section without losing anything vital, and we would have ended up with a much tighter, more consistently emotive film.

Peter Jackson extended all three of the Rings films for the DVDs (in come cases well, in other cases not so well, in my opinion) - so how long is the DVD version of Kong going to be?

Controversial statement to conclude: Kong was better, but I enjoyed Narnia more...