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Film’s from a Natist Perspective
My Movie Reviews

When I heard that Peter Jackson was redoing Kong, my first question was, “Why?”  What attracts a Kiwi hippie to remake the first blockbuster?  Then I started hearing raving reviews about how cool everything looked and what a great story it was.  The fastest three hours you’ll ever spend, I was told.  The most promising part of my pre-Kong experience was the previews and the posters.  Oooooohhhh, so he fights dinosaurs.  Now I am interested!

That is how I found myself watching Kong to celebrate MLK with Kate with a mixture of excited anticipation and a sense of forboding of what could come.  I actually liked the beginning of the movie a lot.  Even though some of the characters and plot devices seemed a little canned, they were engaging enough to hold my interest.  I had been very apprehensive about Jack Black, but ended up enjoying him.  

When we got to the island I got my first taste of Jackson’s real talent in this movie, freaking me out with gross, messed up stuff.  The natives were hideous, where does he find these people, do they have a quality ugly school in New Zealand?  Yikes.  I did like the ape and all the running around and stuff, though this part of the movie loses a lot of its tension because we know that he is going to end up liking her and with her back in New York.  So instead, we have to be entertained by all the fancy special effect dinosaur fights.  Even though I had really looked forward to this, I ended up a little tired.  I mean three T-rexes?  I know they have tiny arms/brains, but . . . The only thing that did surprise me during this part of the film was the crews ability to come to the rescue out of nowhere along with another classic gross/freakout scene at the bottom of the ravine.  Poor Cookie, poor poor Cookie.

The stuff back in New York was fun, but again, we basically know what is going to happen.  It was cool watching Kong knock airplanes around, boy were they surprised. 

Overall, I think that the film did a lot with an old story line.  And there was some fun stuff along the way.  While I also knew what was going to happen in Lord of the Rings, for some reason that seemed like a more enjoyable re-creation.  While  Kong kept me interested,  I was not left thirsting for more.