A king-sized disappointment. Overlong and self-indulgent, as if Peter Jackson has already reached the point in his career that certain novelists do: where nobody has the guts to tell him he needs to cut something. And cuts would certainly have helped, as every single scene lasts to the point where the dramatic tension drains out of it, and anything that happens once tends to happen twice -- as if Jackson were worried we wouldn't get it. Or perhaps, as is often the way with pet projects, he simply couldn't bear to let go.

The movie fails on the most basic level of any remake: I wished I were watching the original. It is kind of interesting to realize that the very latest in computer animation doesn't manage to be more convincing than a stop-motion puppet from 1930. And it is also interesting that the past seventy years of developing political correctness somehow yielded Skull Island natives who are more savage and inexplicable than the rough stereotypes in the original. (It isn't the fact that they like to dress up in skulls and sacrifice an exotic blonde stranger to their giant monkey-god that I'm talking about here -- that's all required by the plot. It's the fact that they seem barely lingual, unable to feed themselves adequately, and without construction skills.)

In fact, this movie is a perfect example of what is wrong with modern movies compared to classics from the thirties and forties: it is more concerned with showing us cool-looking stuff than in telling a story.

I'm serious. Watch an old classic sometime and note how much of the story they've already told in the first fifteen minutes. In modern movies -- especially modern blockbuster epics -- fifteen minutes in they're still doing establishing shots. Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy avoided this somewhat, because he was working with an epic story to begin with. With Kong, he's working from...a movie. Further, a movie less than half as long as his own movie.

(Note: Serenity totally did not do this. It was blam-blam-blam story all the way through. It was awesome. Watch it.)

Jackson's Kong is not utterly without charm. It is, of course, gorgeous. The recreation of Depression-era New York is breathtakingly convincing, like cinematic time travel. And some of the little touches work perfectly, like the shot of Adrian Brody as the screenwriter typing away behind the bars of an animal cage, or a shot stopping to mourn the broken men who have fallen to the bottom of a ravine which also stops to mourn the broken and exposed canister of film. Jackson clearly loved this movie. But he loved it without reservation or judgment.

Probably his worst miscalculation is in the way he develops the Beauty and the Beast story which forms the heart of the movie. He chose to make Ann Darrow's (Naomi Watts) eventual acceptance of Kong explicit rather than implicit, which in itself was not a bad move. The problem is that the story is clearly over as soon as Beauty learns to love the Beast, which happens here before they even get him back to New York.

This causes all sorts of pacing, dramatic, and plot problems that were completely unnecessary. For example, her tearful reaction to the ship's crew successfully chloroforming and capturing Kong is pretty much exactly the same as her tearful reaction to when airplanes kill him on top of the Empire State Building. This takes what could have been a real tearjerker moment (and is, in the original) and renders it tedious and drawn out, because we've already seen it. And it makes her behavior on Skull Island a little inexplicable. Is she actually trying to escape from Kong with love interest Adrian Brody? She looks a little reluctant to leave. And if she really doesn't want them to capture Kong, why doesn't she work harder to stop them? All she does here is a lot of slow-motion shouting of "Noooooooo!" and reaching out her arms while members of the ship's crew hold her back.

Also, and I just feel I have to mention this, the giant flesh-eating bats are completely unconvincing. Yes, I know they're meant to be some kind of super jumbo creepy atavistic critter, like the giant flesh-eating slugworms, but their behavior as animals doesn't make a lot of sense (if they're supposed to be something like giant prehistoric vampire bats, why do they ignore the humans completely and not feed on Kong until he's awake? And bats simply don't swarm like that. No, not even prehistoric ones.) Also, their slimy toothy faces looks suspiciously reptilian. Bats are mammals, Jackson, I know you know that. They're cute and furry, just like Kong.

Just thought I'd mention it.

Overall, the movie wasn't actually painful to sit through, which elevates it above other recent good-director-misfires involving monkeys (Planet of the Apes) and giant rampaging humanoids (The Hulk). I wasn't so much bored as impatient and unmoved. And, as noted, wishing I were watching the original instead.