Kong: the king of disasters

Methinks if I should waste any more of my time on this movie after having expended three hours and seven minutes watching it. Just a few remarks. What was Peter Jackson thinking when he looked at the script and decided he could make a movie with it that is so unbelievably long? What were the executives at Universal thinking when they gave Jackson full creative control? The sets, the atmosphere, the camera movement, perspective and color filters all seem to be recycled from LOTR. The dramatic dialogue and the significant silences in between made sense in the epic context of LOTR, but when the main purpose of the protagonists is to capture an oversize gorilla for a circus, the heroic epigrams seem plain ludicrous. The editing is vacuous; why did they need a shot of the starlet's feet as she steps onto the gangplank? What is the earth-shattering significance of that moment in the overall plot? And the human drama just does not merit the attention it has received in this movie, because, oh my god, this is just King Kong we are talking about, not some momentous battle between the forces of good and evil for hegemony over Middle Earth! The gender and race roles depicted are, ahem, interesting: for instance, you will notice that it takes a white girl to tell the native King Kong for the first time in his life that women deserve more respect and are not to be pushed around, literally. About the story line and the action, it all looked like better-done versions of earlier sequences in Jurassic Park or numerous films in the Large-Bug-Attacking-Humans-at-Random genre. Among the nice things, I thought the portayal of the romance between Kong and the lady was sweeter than in any of the previous versions. The finale at the Empire State Building looked better too, with its rosy dawn sky and Kong JUMPING and swatting at the planes, which I thought was very cute and brave of him, given the fix he was in. As for Ann Darrow's attempts to teach Kong a foreign language, I was not impressed. She should have tried the ABCs first instead of trying to start off with an arguably heavy word like "beautiful". Even I would jump off a tall building if faced with such a prospect.