If you like King Kong, don't read this.

I saw King Kong yesterday afternoon. I didn't have very high expectations, and I didn't like it much. Technically, it was dazzling. You do forget that the monkey isn't real. The movie is overlong, and I don't think the extra backstory helped. I didn't like any of the actors, and that includes all the supporting cast, not just Watts and Black and Brody. Well, Andy Serkis was good as the monkey, I should give him credit.

The movie is a remake with lots of "improvements" on the original. More sailors on the boat. Bigger guns for the sailors. More dead sailors. The wall is bigger. There are more natives on the island. More brontosauruses. More bugs. Kong's fight with the dinosaur becomes a WWE lumberjack match. One-on-one just isn't enough in today's style of overblown moviemaking. And what the hell were those larval sucker things?

I was struck the strong similarity between Watts' wide-eyed performance and Wood's Frodo in LOTR. Oh look, the poor little thing is threatened again and looks terrified. Yawn. (See pic above.)

The plot of this movie (and the older versions, to be fair) just has so many holes I can't handle it. Why is a 25-foot monkey interested in a 5-foot woman? How did they survive a brontosaurus stampede that ran right over them? How could three vines hold up a two-ton ape? How come when Ann runs away from the monkey (twice) she can't get away, but Jack shows up to "rescue" her it works? Why does the gunfire on the island just make him mad and the airplane guns kill him? When one bottle of chloroform knocked him cold before, how come nobody has a bottle in New York?

The thing that makes me absolutely furious about this movie is that critics seem to be loving it to death. I don't understand critics at all. Sometimes I think they're just bored. Or on the take.

Oh yeah... there's a Wilhelm Scream in the bronto chase. I forgot to mention that there's a Wilhelm Scream in Aeon Flux too, during the climax gun battle.