I guess I'll post my review of the film from IMDB.
I saw it today and I was extremely disappointed. Maybe I expected too much? I don't know. Ever since seeing Jurassic Park when I was just 7, I really was hoping this would be the next great escapism experience. It was a very good film visually, but everything else just fell flat and it turns into a self-indulgent mess. For one thing, Peter Jackson either needs to learn how to edit films or hire a good editor. You could easily cut out 45 minutes of this 3 hour and 15 minute film and not lose a thing. The original King Kong told the exact same story in 1 hour and 40 minutes. The beginning is ridiculously long. I've heard many say that it's necessary for character development. What character development? You'll find out by the third hour that even though they had an hour to develop, you still don't care about any of these people. It's also not a good thing when characters run into situations normal people would have died in a thousand times over, because boy, every single one of them should have been dead the first 20 minutes the action started, and that includes the beast himself. I understand that nothing about the film is not supposed to be particularly believable, but this is just too much. I mean, I'm certain King Kong did a wrestler's elbow drop on a T-Rex at least once.
I understand that if filmmakers had had this technology to make movies decades ago, they would have abused it like filmmakers of today are. But King Kong is just the latest example of how CGI is destroying creativity. This is not a knock on the people who created these digital effects, but rather Peter Jackson. "I can't figure out how to make this creature look real and believable, let's put it in digitally!" or "My script doesn't have enough dialogue to justify 3 hours, let's toss in some digital effects and extend the action scenes. I'm sure no one will notice!" I mean, I'm sure if anyone else went to film school for a couple of years, then received a 200 million dollar budget to make this movie, they could have done the same. Stick with the original.