I just saw King Kong today, and this isn’t so much a review as it is some general first impressions.

I used to be very skeptical about this project, when I first heard about Peter Jackson doing it, right after Lord of the Rings. I had seen the original once, and the 70s remake once, and I didn’t think of it as anything special. I didn’t think the story was good enough to work as a modern movie. But now that I’ve seen the remake, I have to say that there’s more than enough story there. And if this was the movie Peter Jackson saw in his head when he thought back to the original, I see why he liked it so much.

Just to get the complaints out of the way: It’s a tad too long. It could have been cut maybe 15 minutes in total, and it would have had better flow. Also, a few effects don’t look great, the compositing is a little lazy, and the perspective is a little wrong. But the vast majority of the effects look amazing, so all in all, I’m not going to complain too much about it.

Peter Jackson hasn’t forgotten his horror skills either. The second act is grueling, and it goes on and on. About midway into it, I was thinking “Peter Jackson should do a horror movie again, and make it this intense. It would be the scariest, most impacting thing in the world”. A while later, though, I was revising that thought. If this much intensity was put into a pure horror movie, of the kind I like, where there’s little humor to offset the grimness, it might well become totally unwatchable. At the very least, it would create reactions like the ones people had to The Exorcist when it was new; people in hysterics running from the theater, sobbing and screaming.

There’s hardly a phobia, at least not a phobia of mine, that this movie doesn’t poke at. There are confined spaces, wild animals, giant insects and spiders, heights, darkness, giant bats, and god knows what else. And the fucking centipedes. I hate centipedes, and I feel like this movie made everyone else in the audience understand me completely. Burroughs would know what I’m talking about. And giant fleas, and leeches, and spiders, and ants, and dinosaurs, and breakfast cereal, and I was pretty exhausted. But in a good way, like after a lot of good sex. But with giant leeches. You understand.

(Sean T. Collins seems to agree with a lot of the things I’m saying, only, as usual, he says them better. Check out his review.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 20th, 2005 at 5:13 am and is filed under Horror, Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.