King Kong Movie Review by our resident movie critic Devon Pollard

After successfully adapting the classic trilogy “The Lord of the Rings” (and subsequently winning three academy awards), Peter Jackson only had one direction to go—up. Straight up. All the way to the top of the Empire State Building. Despite an enormous budget, pummeling action and CG infatuation, Jackson manages to tame the beast with a well-written script and complete, intriguing characters in this, the latest remake of “King Kong.”

Ann Darrow [Naomi Watts] is an out of work vaudeville actress starving in depression era New York. It is here she meets Carl Denham [Jack Black], a shifty film director who's obsessed with completing his picture before the funding gets cut. It isn’t long before Darrow and Denham are sailing across the ocean to "Skull Island," a mythical parcel of land sequestered in perma-fog, an island not yet plundered by modern man. It’s the only place Denham is willing to shoot his picture.

And understandably so. Evolutionary speaking, Skull Island is Galapagos gone to hell. The island's complete isolation from the rest of modern civilization created a fiendish time warp with undiscovered, strange species under every rock and behind every tree. Giant creatures rule this prehistoric land, each more terrible than the last. And when Denham’s film crew shipwrecks upon this mysterious island, the humans quickly fall prey.
But even a talented filmmaker as Peter Jackson has his faults; mainly he doesn't know when to quit. They say you can't have too much of a good thing. Well Jackson took this too much to heart. Ironically, the film's only "short" coming is its length. With a beast of a running time at three hours and seven minutes, “Kong” is a long movie. And there are a few action sequences that drag on beyond what they ought to. A fight between Kong and three (yes three) tyrannosauruses moves like the energizer bunny, just going and going far beyond the audience's interest. And there is a brontosaurus stampede where one almost wishes to be trampled just to bring an end the harrowing monotony of the artificial near-death-experience.

But despite these few annoyances, “Kong” succeeds. The great majority of the film is exhilarating. Once again Peter Jackson has created a world beyond imagination. “King Kong” has all the grit of his preceding work, with the heart to match. The audience becomes deeply invested not only in the success of the human characters, but also in Kong himself. The part of the giant gorilla is brilliantly played by a digitally captured Andy Serkis, who previously performed as the creature Gollum in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Serkis transforms the gorilla into something more human than animal, and lends Kong true emotions that have the audience rooting for the big brute all the way till the bitter end.

---Devon Pollard

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