King Kong - Why this?

So I am back after a long break. Without going into any silly excuses, the break has been bigger than what I intended it to be. Though not many people seem to be missing my blog, I certainly missed my blog.

I saw King Kong recently and now have the urge to review it. Not because it was very good, but because my opinion seems to be so much different from the opinions I find elsewhere. I was quite easily getting bored in what is billed as a top commercial film for 2005. Actually I don’t expect much logic from a commercial (‘masala’) film. I only expect it to proceed in such a way (for example, move at a fast pace) so that we don’t notice the logical flaws, at least till the end of the movie. In my recent viewings, movies like Anniyan and Gilli fitted this quite well.

But King Kong was neither an absorbing masala movie, neither did it have an interesting story line. Of course, one thing I have to clarify is that I was never able to accept a gorilla expressing so much affection for a human (in such a short time) and even worse, the human reciprocating it! May if some one is able to accept it the movie would be more viewable. Nevertheless, I don’t find any excuse for showing a whole zoo of crazy creatures in the forest scenes in Skull island. Just because you have the power of computer graphics doesn’t mean that you have to overuse it like this! As every possible creature which fitted the imagination of the director comes on screen, we (myself and my friends) were laughing out at the action sequences, for otherwise we would have been nauseated by those animals.

I have jotted down some amusing and illogical things I found in the movie. Usually I don’t do this for a commercial movie, but in this I was able to find so many flaws even while watching the movie, that I thought I should put them down.

• Most of the characters in the movie (including King Kong) seem to be mad – they do extremely risky things, bordering on illogical. I can excuse the movie producer’s madness in going to a remote island as ambitiousness, but I find no excuse as to why the crew of the ship went into an unknown forest for just rescuing a girl, how he accepted to encounter a mighty gorilla with only Chloroform and some ropes and finally how the girl thinks that climbing to the top of Empire state building can save the gorilla.


• Every animal in the Skull island seems to be all set to fight until death! From my limited exposure to Discovery channel, my knowledge is that animals don’t hunt unless they are hungry and though they fight with each other over for instance a female, they rarely ever fight till death. But here we see two dinosaurs fighting to death with the King Kong over such a small prey like Ann. Of course the other thing I remembered when I saw the King Kong facing three dinosaurs was how it was exactly analogous to Rajinikanth (or any other mass hero) finishing of ten villains ;-)


• Back in New York the movie’s human hero (forgot his name!) directs King Kong to Ann in the very next scene after wondering why she is not present in the auditorium.

Apart from the above, I did find numerous logical flaws later. Of course the main flaw was that the movie was too lengthy. It could have easily been trimmed of by 30 minutes, mainly in scenes in the forest and also in scenes on the ship. One thing I liked about the movie was the way it started and showed the New York of depression era. The relation between King Kong and Ann though unbelievable was shown quite subtly and some sequences like the skating scene were quite good.

In summary, this is quite a mediocre movie with an unbelievable storyline, entertaining only if you are ready to tolerate a zoo of weird animals and be able to appreciate an extra-human (!) relationship. I really don’t understand why it is getting such good reviews – perhaps a majority of people fit the above description!

Personally, my last two movie outings have been a disaster despite having selected the movies. The last movie was Ghajini. Except for cute romance between Surya and Asin there was really nothing else in the movie. And just like how I feel King Kong misused and overused some good computer graphics, I felt Ghajini had misused and disused an excellent movie concept like Short term memory loss.

This was a post written in some urgency, but I have two posts pending for a long time, which I am putting down just so that I don’t forget to write them.

1. A review (or should I say an overview) of Tamil television serials.


2. A review of three excellent biographical Tamil movies Bharathi, Kamaraj, Iruvar.