PHIDONG.COM . 5.0

If you're here to read about one of the best movies this year, you've come to the wrong place. Maybe if today were opposite day or something of the like, but it isn't.

What a way to bring in the new year. Watch a movie with a couple good friends. It would've been great had King Kong not been the greatest disappointment of the year. It was so bad that I would prefer watching War of the Worlds three times in place of what I saw tonight. Hell, it'd be just about as long.

For over three hours, Peter Jackson tells you a story about King Kong, eigth wonder of the world, but the title should be King Kong: Eight Hours of Nothing.

Visually, the movie was stunning. The special effects were great, maybe even grounbreaking. For $200 million dollars, you wouldn't really expect much less. But we can't judge a book by its cover. No, we shouldn't judge a book by its cover. Underneath the special effects, there was nothing ....

If you haven't seen the movie, don't. I'm going to ruin it for you anyway.

We have a plot. Fine, a movie director tricks a bunch of people into going to a forgotten island to film his masterpiece. They meet King Kong and he falls in love with Ann Darrow. They put the giant gorilla to sleep and take him back home where he dies.

O..k...

When they get to the island, there are a group of savage people living there who kill a couple of the "film crew's" men. They are saved by the "ship crew" and before they leave, Ann is captured and given to King Kong. After this, the people who lived on the island disappear.. FOREVER!?

Where did they go? Why were they so hostile in the beginning? Why did they go back for Ann?

Was it because they worship King Kong or something? If yes, why didn't they do anything towards the middle of the movie when King Kong is being captured? If no, why didn't they do anything towards the middle of the movie when King Kong is captured?

They obviously cared enough to get Ann that they would go capture her from a ship where the people from it killed several of them. It isn't like there were only 3 of them either. There were hundreds! Children, women, old ladies, men, boys, you name it. Enough to have a HUGE ceremony with fire waterfalls. Enough people to build structures all around the island (we all know King Kong or the dinosaurs didn't build that stuff).

The movie features several oh noes we're dead sequences and predictably the characters are saved. What inspires the captain to come back to save Carl? What inspires Bruce Baxter to come back to save everyone?

Character development. There is NONE. All of the characters are completely one dimensional. If you consider the movie has no plot, what drives it? It isn't the characters.

Carl Denham is a movie director with no conscience. He doesn't care about his friends. He doesn't care about anybody except for himself. His ONE singular passion during the movie was to make his film, but after the reel is destroyed he completely gives up on it. If there was one person that nobody should've saved, it's him. Yet, the captain comes back to save Carl and his men. Baxter comes back to save Carl and in the end it's Carl standing tall and alive while the one character whose death Carl was directly responsible for lied on the floor (King Kong).

Then we have Ann. Ahhh, Ann. She loves Jack so much that he already won her heart even before they got to the island. Yet, after they get on the island she has a bunch of teary-eyed moments with King Kong. He saves her life a couple times and bam, shes in love with him too? What a filthy whore. Come on. Jack or Kong? Kong or Jack? When Jack comes to "save" her from the horrible monster, she sides with Jack. Then she gets mad at Jack for holding her back when the group is trying to capture Kong. So mad that the play he wrote for her, she'll have nothing to do with it when they get back to New York. She instead goes for Kong who ends up dying. In the final moments of the film when Kong is dead, she turns around and BAM! Theres Jack! Right in time. They hug and kiss. WHAT THE FUCK!?

Too long. Way too long. I could've told the movie in an hour, so King Kong was three times longer than it needed to be, which by my logic means King Kong wasn't just a bad movie. It was three of them. Scenes are dragged on FOREVER without anything happening. Ann loves Jack right? Where was the character interaction? Yeah, she read his plays and admired them but when did they fall in love? Ann loves Kong right? Because he saved her life? Please. There are hundreds of moments in the movie where characters are just standing there....

JUST STANDING!

Don't even get me started on the giant bugs, dinosaurs, etc.

So what is it? A romance? A story about a whore? An action flick? A drama? A comedy? A thriller?

Theres no love story here, just a story about a slut that falls in love with a giant gorilla but at the same time loves a comedy play writer. There are no jokes, no drama (they don't even play with the tension between the two loves, what the fuck?) A thriller? Hardly. The movie is incredibly predicatable. I mean we ALL know King Kong is going to die. How more predictable can it get!? Then you have the action. BORING. The fight scenes, while epically long are far from epic. They're boring. It's almost as if a five year old scripted it. You have 10 dinosaurs going after King Kong. They all jump on him like a child would pile up toy cars and BAM! King Kong wins, then he loses, then he bats his arms around at planes for an hour and a half before dying and then Carl comes out of nowhere and says Beauty (Ann?! or the sunset) killed the beast.

If you want to see a good sci-fi action movie with characters and a plot, go watch Serenity.

If you want to waste $10 and 3 hours of your life, go see King Kong.

1.2/10 - Worst movie ever made. 3 hours long, but if Peter Jackson hired an editor to edit the movie for the same amount of time, he'd probably cut 2/3 of it out. I'd honestly rather watch War of the Worlds or Medallion 3 times in a row than see King Kong again.