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Finally, my brother has felt the pain I had felt twice before: sitting through an extremely long, drawn out film by Peter Jackson and loathing every minute. My brother Chris is a big Lord of the Rings fan, and he's never understood why I disliked the trilogy of films (or at least the first two films; I gave up on the series before the last movie was released). On Christmas night, though, he, my wife, and I went to see King Kong, and we all came to the same conclusion. The film was WAY too long. I have been known to fall asleep watching TV and DVDs on a regular basis, but I've only fallen asleep during three movies while in the theater: About Schmidt (I was extremely tired), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (I was extremely bored), and now Peter Jackson's Swedish-made enlarger version of King Kong (I was extremely both of those). I can see why people would enjoy the Lord of the Rings trilogy after having read the books and anticipating a decent film version for so long; I was neither of those, so I guess one could say I just didn't get it. I can also understand why people want to see the extended DVD versions of the film, since the novels were so massive that fans want to see every minute of the story unfold on the screen. There was no way to create three films from three epic novels without cutting something out as was done with Lord of the Rings; King Kong, however, is quite a different story. Having been a film, and only a film, Peter Jackson's source material was quite terse, unlike the grand Tolkien works of literature he had to work with before. The 1933 version film clocked in at a svelte 100 minutes; Jackson's version clocks in at a morbidly obese 187 minutes. Even before King Kong, I had come to the conclusion that Peter Jackson couldn't make a film under three hours; this problem, coupled with his obsession with the original Kong film, makes for some extremely drawn out viewing. Jackson seemingly refused to add any major plot elements to the film for fear of tainting the original masterpiece, so how did he manage to stretch the film to an additional 87 minutes? He just made everything take longer. Much, much longer. Instead of a two-minute fight between King Kong and a couple of dinosaurs, it now takes ten minutes. What once took mere moments to establish the tribes of Skull Island now takes enormous sweeping, special-effects laden camera shots of various dirty, dentally-challenged people of politically-correct indeterminate race and their incoherent babbling. Instead of taking ten minutes to shoot a giant gorilla off the top of a building, it now takes around a half-hour. It was very sad to see Kong die such a violent death in the original film; in the new version I was ready to shoot him down myself just to get it over with. I'm sure that many people will go to see the film and find its length appropriate; for those of you who don't, however, will, like my brother, finally feel my pain.
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