- Sun Mar 19, 2017 11:49 am
#33188
Initial review of Kong is strong. Not gonna' lie, I went into the movie kind of expecting to hate it. Don't ask me why, because I really don't know. The opening act seemed kind of odd at first, to the point where I kind of looked around to see if anyone else was thinking the same thing as me with "I AM in the right movie, right?" Obviously that was quickly remidied.
Biggest fault I could find is that outside of Goodman and maybe John C. Reilly, I kind of felt like everyone was phoning it in. And the fact that Goodman's death was so anticlimactic and unceremonious that I actually laughed. Like, I'd argue he was THE main character of the movie (sorry, Hiddleston, but you're the Jurassic World Chris Pratt of the movie, the cocky a-hole who doesn't change) and he kicks the bucket with 30 minutes left in such a blue-ball way. And the Scooby-Doo level coincidence of the Skullcrawler coughing up Toby Kebbell's half-digested skull at the right moment and right place that rolled in the perfect position for Hiddleston's 40/20 vision to see that the dog tag - which was conveniently free of blood, slime and digestive juices that might've obscured it - had his name on it. That and the ham-fisted, obligatory "My name is Nick Fury Lite and I'm here to talk to you about the MONARCH Initiative, also please watch these trailers for Rodan, Mothra and King Ghidorah". But who cares, because we're gonna' get more kaiju movies!!!!!!!
But even with all of that, hot dang, what a treat. Even as a dinosaur fanatic like me, without any dinosaurs, it was a nice change of pace. The variety of creatures were so cool. This is a perfect example of how you do a remake of a movie that already had a movie released a short while ago and how to properly differentiate between them and keep things fresh. All of the Skull Island creatures were fantastic, the VFX were fantastic, Kong himself was fantastic x10.
VFX-wise, again, wonderful. There were only a handful of iffy shots that I can recall (mostly people standing against glaringly obvious green-screen), but so many of the environment shots had me fooled as to where real photography ended and CG extension began. Kong's design and animation were fascinating to watch and compare to Weta's work on Jackson's.
