King Bomb

I saw King Kong this afternoon.

I want those three hours of my life back.

I think the main problem is that Jackson seems to think that Kong is an epic tale. It is not. It is an action flick. Jackson also seems to think that Kong is a love story, like so:

Boy meets girl
Boy falls in love
Boy loses girl to ape

I’m thinking no. Sorry, but my suspension of disbelief just doesn’t carry into interspecies romance, particularly when one of the species is twenty-five feet tall.

More does not necessarily equate to better. The original Kong fights one T-Rex. This one fights three. And falls down into a ravine while doing so. So does Ann Darrow, who manages to catch a vine, only to see a T-Rex, also caught in the vines, swinging towards her with Jaws. Of. Death. Of course, the ape saves her. This scene did not require suspension of your disbelief. This scene required that you cancel your disbelief for the rest of your life, because you have just used up all the suspension time allotted to a normal moviegoer in one lifetime.

But that wasn’t quite enough. You needed to suspend it even more through the rest of the film. Especially the part where Ann Darrow starts falling in love with a giant ape–right after he saved her from the dinosaurs, at great cost to himself. You could tell what she was thinking: Gee, what a nice ape. He saved my life, and he could have died.

To which I would point out: IDIOT! WHY WAS YOUR LIFE IN DANGER IN THE FIRST PLACE? BECAUSE YOU WERE SACRIFICED TO THE GIANT APE!

But why let logic interfere with a film that has no logic other than to be cooler than the original Kong.

There is so much more crap in this film that I could spend about ten thousand words and still not be done with it. Suffice to say that I almost never walk out during a movie, no matter how badly I need to use the rest room. I left during the bug scene. Jackson’s take on Skull Island is that everything is bigger, including the bugs. It led to one of the few funny scenes in the film, when one of the crew shot up a mosquito that kept bothering him. But it also led to the most disgusting scene in the film, with centipedes and leech-like things and disgusting bugs coming out to go after the men after Kong had shaken them loose from the tree. (They don’t all die in this one; they fall to the canyon floor and some survive.)

The final sequences are even more annoying, seeming to harken to the 1970s Dino DeLaurentis remake instead of the 1933 film. Ann Darrow actually goes after Kong to try to stop the biplanes from finishing him off. I liked her better when she was plain old Fay Wray, screaming and fainting and waiting for Jack to come and rescue her. (Do not even talk to me about the ice-skating scene in Central Park. Kong goes sliding on the ice. With girl in hand. Yes. Seriously. Please. I’m surprised there wasn’t a hot cocoa vendor waiting for them when they were finished. “Hot cocoa for the lady sir? And a banana for yourself? Right away, sir!”)

So yeah, the special effects were great. Sure, Kong felt real. And yes, the actors were all wonderful (the actor playing the captain bears a striking resemblance to Liam Neeson). But overall, the movie sucked. It was–well, stupid.

We had the whole Skull Island Kong thing going for us. Did we really need the raptor attack, the brontosaurus herd stampede, the giant centipedes, leeches, and spiders, the giant vampire bats, the triple T-Rex attack, the fall into the vines not once, not twice, but three times during the T-Rex scene, and then, of course, the Kong-is-gonna-get-you final scene on Skull Island, necessitating the throwing of the chloroform by Jack Denham?

You know, I left the theater with a bad feeling overall. It was a nasty, nasty film, with nothing but unnecessary death and destruction. I felt no sympathy for the ape. He’s a giant ape. Yeah, he has to die, but y’know, there were an awful lot of human bones in the place where he first brought Ann Darrow. Not feeling all that sympathetic. Plus, the whole mass-murder in New York, especially of any blonde woman who wasn’t Ann and had the misfortune of crossing Kong’s path. No, not feeling sorry at all.

On the other hand, I was feeling sorry that I spent money on that film.

On my way out of the theater, a couple was walking in front of me, discussing the final scene, which included many long looks between Ann Darrow and Kong as he lay dying on top of the Empire State Building. “It was, like, 45 minutes of them just looking at each other,” the man complained. The woman said nothing, so I put in, “Yes, but they were such meaningful glances.”

Best damned line of the night.