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King Kong Movie Review

King Kong is a 2005 monster adventure film directed by Peter Jackson and starring Andy Serkis and Naomi Watts. It’s overblown beyond proportions, but overall it’s quite a spectacle.

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“Actors! They travel the world,

all they ever see is a mirror“

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This is a remake of the 1933 original that remains a classic and the quintessential version of this story. Peter Jackson is obviously a huge fan of it and that admiration can clearly be seen in this remake where he loves every single sequence so much that he ended up doubling or quadrupling them in length.

I have never been a fan of this director, and this movie is a great example of everything that he does good and all of his worst tendencies. Yes, the movie is a spectacle done in the old-fashioned style of the last century, but only elevated by computer generated effects and more grandiose action scenes. The adventurous spirit is still there and the film can be quite enchanting at times, not to mention rather epic.

But in trying to make it as big of a spectacle as it could possibly be, he overdid every minute detail and sequence to the point that it becomes needlessly overblown and just plain tiring to watch. You’ve got here over an hour of story before they even get to Skull Island and that was a problem. Ultimately, the movie became exhausting to watch, even though the director’s intentions were clearly great.

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What this movie actually does better than the original is the central relationship between a beast and a woman. As it is three hours long, the movie focused a lot on this interesting relationship and the two are the heart of the movie, leading to that ending being all the more sad and powerful. Whenever the film focused just on these two, it was lovely.

Naomi Watts is excellent as Ann Darrow and Andy Serkis is per usual fantastic. The motion capture is incredible in this film. Jack Black is memorable as this annoying, greedy film producer and the film really captured the thirties with the strong emphasis on how studios worked back then. Adrien Brody as Jack Driscoll is just okay, but a bit forgettable.

Kong has to fight many dinosaurs here in what was surely an overkill, as everything is in this overblown movie, but most of it was wildly entertaining, there is no denying that. The movie captured the adventurous elements very well with the arrival on the island being quite wonderful. The action was overwhelming, but some of the animal fights were terrific. It depends what person you are as it regards your enjoyment of the film’s action. I am more into one-on-one fights and I dislike weaponry, so obviously the scenes where the humans were attacking Kong bored me while the animal fights were to me rather cool and fun.

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This King Kong has fantastic special effects. Kong looks incredible, the eyes of Serkis hold a lot of heart behind them and the island looks incredible, especially the dinosaurs. It was a groundbreaking movie visually for its time, and it still looks marvelous. The score is also strong and some of the dialogue is quite good, but the pacing is horribly dragging at times, the action is overwhelming and the movie is simply too long.

Peter Jackson’s King Kong is a respectable, but tiresome remake. This director has the tendency to overblow every single scene beyond any reasonable proportions, which is exactly what happened in this three-hour long movie filled with extremely prolonged, endless scene after scene. The movie is quite adventurous at times, some of the monster fights on the island are super cool and the VFX were groundbreaking for this time and they still look great. The highlight is the central beast-woman relationship that is actually better here than it was in the original thanks to wonderful work from Andy Serkis and Naomi Watts. The film is well-intentioned and frequently quite charming, but its excessive runtime was its ultimate doom.

My Rating – 3.5