Could not believe this was so bad - King Kong Reviews

Let me start off by saying that I am a lifelong monster movie and science fiction fan. I hurried home from work, had my family snarf down dinner, and rushed to the theater to see the remake of one of my all time favorite classics King Kong. We wondered what was up when the theater was still only half full for the prime time opening 7pm showing, but nothing could have prepared me (or us) for the fiasco that was to follow. The first part of the film was uneven (Jackson takes complete liberty with the story line, changing the very nature of key characters and thereby the story itself) but reasonably enjoyable until we got to the island, at which point, the best way I could describe the next hour and a half was a completely self absorbed, dimented director, completely ignoring the story and his actors in favor of showing how much moment to moment mind numbing special effects he can throw at the audience. And mind numbing was what it was. With barely a second to catch your breath, and with little to do with the actual story, director Peter Jackson (I will never go to one of his movies again) goes from one preposterous dinosaur stomping, flesh ripping, disaster scene to the next, leaving precious little time (as is his apparent style) for storytelling. Oh sure, the animation of Kong himself was impressive and probably the only real bright spot in the film, but it was difficult to enjoy even that. Starting with the natives from hell (more like night of the living dead) and progressing to the absurd dinosaur stampede, the movie quickly dissolved into what looked more like a video game my son plays at home. Despite the beautiful leading actress, the movie failed even to touch on the senualism Fay Wray is still remembered for more than 70 years after the original. Remarkably, our heroine in this movie spends hours (days??? we can't tell) running around the island barefoot in lengerie and yet retains her eye makeup, curly hair, and never hurts her feet. Some of the scenes were truly ridiculous. And when did this story become a two way relationship? Sure, even in the original we all rooted for Kong to some degree and felt badly for him, and he fell in love with the girl, but in this movie, there were times when it looked like the girl was actually ready to ride off into the sunset with Kong and live happily ever after. I could go on and on, but the bottom line was, THIS MOVIE WAS A DISASTER. I could not wait to go home and watch the original, which we will do this weekend after we have had a few days to recover. In fact, we could not wait for the movie to end so we could leave. Please, save your money, and go see a great Sci-Fi movie like War of the Worlds, which proved that both an original and a remake could both be classics and masterpieces. I think I will stick with Spielberg and Lucas from now on. Jackson cares only about satisfying his own ego, nothing about stories, his actors, or for that matter, his audience. I predict this will be the biggest box office flop of all time, relative to expectations and it's cost. If we didn't have our 14 year old with us, who didn't remember the original and who seemed to like it well enough (he spends most of his time playing video games), we may actually have walked out, it was that bad. What a shame. Entertainment? Not in my book.