Granted, Kong is a monster-themed movie.

Nevertheless the gaping holes in logic just kept on pouring and pouring and pouring (I could have forgiven a half a dozen logic problems given the theme of the movie, really, but there just didn't seem to be an end to those - from the beginning right down to the closing). It began to bug me.

The movie is way too long in my opinion. There were some 10-minute shots left in the movie that had absolutely nothing to do with the plot. I don't know about the general movie-going public, but in my book whole scenes could have been edited out without any fear of the story losing impact.

I saw it from the biggest screen in Nordic countries - and it became crystal clear that the lip-sync was off! I don't know if it was a problem with movie itself or the equipment used to show it, but it bothered me quite a lot.

The movie has no social, political or economic meaning that gave the original King Kong movie much of it's success. This version is purely entertainment - use it and move on kind of thing. It is also trying to be politically correct which presents a major problem given the atmosphere and attitude of the time it is trying to represent - those are just thrown out of the window.

Soundtrack was utter crap. I at least expected to get music fitting for the epoch, but instead I was bombarded with epic philharmonic sound-barrier for over 2 hours! I mean I can take only so much violin in one sitting. The epic scenes were self-important and took away excitement from the other epic scenes (inflation of epicness if you will). Any movie director should know that making an epic movie does not equal making every single scene in the movie an epic chapter of unforeseen proportions. This very same thing was my major grape with another late blockbuster movie - Revenge of Sith by G.Lucas.

I liked the first part of the movie (the steady and brilliant development of the characters), but was very disappointed that many of the professionaly developed characters just ... well ... disappeared or started acting in a different manner. What's the point in developing complex characters and then not use them? Except for Mr.Preston who was not developed and remained bleak and dull - eventhough Preston was a supporting character to the main character.

The second episode of the film didn't quite add up. At times it was trying to be an adventure/catasrophe movie, then there were episodes that were pure fantasy/horror and then again we saw monster/action scenes. Not mention the puzzling jumps from comedy/farse to drama. I've nothing against humour myself and I laughed my ass off many times, but somehow the overall jumping from one style to another bothered me.

My assessment:
Digital Effects: 4/5 (excellent, but there were too much of it inflating it's effectiveness)
Cinematography: 4/5 (professional, but nothing extraordinary)
Plot development: 2/5 (nothing much to develop in the midst of fierce action scenes)
Coherency: 1/5 (HUGE gaping holes in logic from the beginning to the very end - I mean the sudden changes in conditions (night to day in 5 minutes etc), disappearance of the natives etc - things that deserved at least an explanation).
Soundtrack: 2/5 ('nuf said)
Acting: 3/5 (most were simply shadowed by Jack Black or showed a screen presence that seemed to conflict with the developed character they were playing)

Total: 3/5 - too long, badly edited, but yet an entertaining package of digital effects that doesn't want to to be anything else than that. Edited for typos.

Message edited on: 12/19/2005 03:07