Just saw the new King Kong movie this weekend – and I loved it!
Minor spoiler-y review follows, so read on at your own risk.
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I thought this was great fun!
Not a cerebral film by any stretch of the imagination, but I got everything I wanted out of it.
What did I want? I wanted them to get right to the giant ape action – and they did. Just enough of an intro to lay some foundation.
I wanted Kong to fight a bunch of other big monsters. Check. He had three solid fights, each of them different from the others.
I wanted nods to the history of the character (which we got – old-timey wrestling moves were in evidence more than once).
I wanted human characters that weren't too annoying (they were fine – and Samuel L Jackson was loads of fun to watch chewing on the scenery while doing a Captain Ahab impression and John C Reilly is consistently funny).
And in addition, I got some cool other stuff – there's a future to this franchise, we got a little bit of Kong's history & the history of Skull island, a moderately plausible (plausible enough for a monster movie, at least!) reason for the island to remain undiscovered up through the 1970's, and they even make a point to mention that Kong is a juvenile, and that he's not done growing yet. So that gives them an excuse to have him be way bigger if they follow up with that promised Kong vs Godzilla movie.
So – go see it! It's a great cheezy popcorn flick.
-Alex in Alaska