I missed where you put in the years you were referring to here, and only read this. I was thinking that maybe in this remake, someone actually does what I would do and argues with Denham. “No, man, I was watching. It was definitely the airplanes.”
How come when the T-Rex chomps down on Kong’s arm it doesn’t even draw blood? I would have expected it to rip out big chunks of flesh. Kevlar monkey-hide?
And the stampede was too long.
I read somewhere that they were planning to have Fay Wray say this last line (in this version of the movie), but she passed away a little too soon.
Early in the movie, I loved the little Homage played to Ms. Wray when they were trying to cast a lead actress and they mentioned Fay Wray was busy on some project at RKO.
Found it:
Carl Denham: Fay’s a size four.
Preston: Yes, she is, but she’s doing a picture with RKO.
Carl Denham: Cooper, huh? I might’ve known.
Jim
Yeah, I liked that line hinting at Fay Wray in the original Kong.
Scoundrel, there’s a “documentary” on the natural history of Skull Island? Does it mention where the heck the breeding population of Kongs is? Surely Kong isn’t somehow biologically connected from the human tribal savages, the only other mammals we see on the island.
I think it was hinted at that he was the last of his kind. The Breeding population has reached its end. Still weak, but wasn’t there a scene with Giant Ape bones littering the ground?
Jim
Like I hinted at before, I was just really dissapointed with the CG.
When you watch the the LotR:EE, that’s like 10 hours of movies. I can’t really remember any CG scenes that looked off (the closest was when Lagolis grabbed that horses neck and threw himself up on the horse).
It seems like every few seconds I would look at a CG scene and say “that looks like ass”.
MtM
Yes, it mentions that Kong is the last survivor of his species.
If you look carefully in his caves, you will see several skeletons of his family (I counted at least 4).
I saw plenty of bones, but I assumed they were the bones of prior sacrifices. I didn’t recall the bones being big.
Guess I’ll have to re-watch.
There is a place, early on, when you find the bones of earlier sacrifices, but later, atop “Skull Mountain”, (in the cave of the Big Bats) you come across a lot of giant Ape skeletons (pretty obvious by the big bones, and the obvious ape skulls).
Whatever – it’s King Kong. In the original, Ann is dropped thirty feet and has a 10’ diameter log smash down on top of her – which pins her to the ground until Kong finishes up with his scrap and lifts it off her. And she’s still the preternaturally beautiful Ann Darrow at the end of the film, not some limbless wreck crapping into a bag for the rest of her agonizing existence.
'Cuz it’s, you know – fantasy.
A plausible King Kong would suck rocks.
I’m ashamed to say I didn’t even wonder about the T-Rex size, but then I guess I thought that Kong and all the other animals were scaled up to T-Rex size, rather than everything being enlarged by a set amount (which would result in supergiant T-Rexs). Therefore, the T-Rexs were the right size… as was everything else.
Well, except for Kong’s parasites. Apes are dexterous and social so that they can pick parasites off of each other. It would stand to reason that, like all the other insects on the island, Kong’s parasites would’ve been huge… I can easily imagine Kong’s ticks, for example, to be the size of a large dog.
Imagine Ms. Darrow falling asleep in Kong’s arms… and then a tick comes crawling over to her in the middle of the night… and <insert sound of straw sucking air at the bottom of a glass of water>.
No, it would just require more attention from the director.
Jurassic Park was plausible(*). When people (who were supposed to be actual humans) got battered about by giant creatures, and touched electric fences, they were knocked out or dead.
(*) plausible in the ways of the world. It, and King Kong, may not be actually “plausible”, but only one of them is non-sensical in it’s treatment of the physical nature of the HUMANS.
I had walked out of KK in the theater because they were taking too freaking long to get to the damned island, already. I rented it later and watched the rest of it, and found it watchable but not mind-blowing. I enjoyed the final scenes in New York most of all, particularly atop the Empire State Building.
Kudos to PJ for making me cringe in horror at one point, something I seldom do for any movie. It was when Ann was hiding in the hollow log and a huge, hideous centipede slithered out from the rotten wood and started to crawl on her. I have a serious centipede phobia and that scene was way more frightening to me than dinosaurs, slugs, bats, or what have you.
I actually appreciated the background on Ann & Denham and NYC during the depression. I thought the characters in Jackson’s version were well developed and believable.
I lost my suspension of disbelief with Kong knuckle-running with Ann in his fist. The bronto stampede was ridiculous, The T-rex scene was bullshit. When the first dino chomped his elbow I thought That’s gonna turn septic and kill him in 3 days and the bug pit was even worse. Shooting bugs off someone with a tommy gun. PUH-LEEEASE. The the satin gown in a New York winter.
Grain of salt warning, according to youtube link:this is the lost spider pit sequence recreated by Peter Jackson for the 1933 version of the movie King Kong
Yep, that’s the one. If you have the boxed set of King Kong (contains the original KK, son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young), it is one of the extras included with KK.
You want disappointment try watching “that 1976 Dino de Laurentis abomination” from the 70’s. This was true to the spirit of the original. It was too long, it was slow in places, but overall, a nice retelling of a modern fable.
Good not great, I give it a fairly solid B.
I mostly liked it, but left the theater thinking it was less than the sum of its parts.
The passing reference to Fay Wray being busy with an RKO project was funny. Jack Black was a great Carl Denham; Naomi Watts was luminous. The scenes of Depression-era NYC were great.
But… beaky-boy from “The Pianist” was meh. Far too much of the CGI looked fake. The pit of carnivorous critters was just too icky. And the ice-skating scene in Central Park was :rolleyes: .