Eighth Wonder of the World
Peter Jackson, the director behind the Lord of the Rings trilogy, brought together a great cast for his remake of the classic; actors include Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann, Colin Hanks, Andy Serkis, Evan Parke, Jamie Bell, and Early Edition’s Kyle Chandler. Several of these names may not be very familiar, but each actor turns in a great performance for their particular role. Naomi Watts plays Ann Darrow, the beautiful woman is tricked into traveling with small time film maker hack, Carl Denham (Jack Black). On the boat with her is fellow New Yorker and playwright, Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), who she falls in love with (and vice versa), and who ultimately rescues her. Also on the voyage are a couple of other interesting characters including Hayes (Evan Parke) and Jimmy (Jamie Bell), his young apprentice, almost son, really. Kyle Chandler also keeps things interesting with his role as Bruce Baxter, the high maintenance actor along to star in Denham’s film alongside Ann Darrow.
Of course, the film Denham has told everyone he is shooting isn’t taking place in Singapore, where Ann and the rest of the crew believe they’re headed. Instead, Denham is intent on finding the mysterious Skull Island, despite the warnings of the captain and other crew. A series of events gets the ship going in that fateful direction, and they are eventually stuck, not wrecked, on Skull Island. Bizarre natives put up a feisty welcome, killing several crew and capturing Ann. Driscoll and a team of fifteen others take to the jungle to get her back after she was offered up to Kong, who takes his prize and disappears into the forest.
The adventure the crew goes on to track down Kong and rescue Ann is a long and perilous one. This Blu-ray release includes both the theatrical and extended versions of the film, the latter being about thirteen minutes longer than the former, so you’re talking about a three hour, twenty minute runtime. Driscoll and company encounter all matter of danger from the environment, massive insects, dinosaurs, and dangerous bats. Meanwhile, the ship is ready for sail again and the captain, a live animal capture expert, and Denham hatch a scheme to capture the great beast and return him to New York, against the wishes of Driscoll and Ann.
You likely know the jist of what happens from here; Kong escapes and goes on a rampage to find Ann. She comes to him but their meeting is cut short by the military, whose goal is to kill the great beast, at which they ultimately succeed.
King Kong is a film that has captured the imaginations of people for well over seventy-years now. Peter Jackson’s remake is a enthralling work that features some wonderful cinematography, stellar acting, and a large offering of action, drama, suspense, and character. King Kong was seen as the ‘bad guy’ by nearly everyone in the movie, but I’ve rarely ever wanted the ‘bad guy’ to get away as much as I did Kong. Overall, Peter Jackson’s King Kong is quite an epic film that manages to cover a wide span of genres and do it with great success.
Swinging Onto Blu-ray
The King Kong Blu-ray release does at least two of the three critical elements right: it’s a great film, and the presentation quality is excellent. What it’s lacking, however, is in the extras department, which I’ll elaborate on shortly. First, let me take just a moment to describe how impressed I was at how good the movie looks and sounds, especially given that it is a massive (3h20m) film. There are just a handful of scenes where the skin textures looked grainy, but other than that, you’ll be thoroughly impressed (just like with the old HD-DVD release). The technical quality is one thing, but the gorgeous locales help make this one Blu-ray you may want to show off. Also, the DTS-HD Lossless audio track will keep all the roars and dialogue and gun fire pumping.
For extras, there aren’t many; let’s take a look:
-Two versions of the film – If you want to call this an extra, you get both the Theatrical and Extended versions of the film. The extended is thirteen minutes longer, and frankly you may as well watch that instead of the theatrical; I would have preferred getting just the extended version with more features.
-My Scenes – Universal’s My Scenes feature allows you to set custom bookmarks.
-U-Control – The U-Control function on this disc is neat, but I still would have loved to have seen more. With it you can view a few Picture-In-Picture ‘making of’ clips as well as animated or storyboard versions of scenes.
-BDLive – Nothing exciting here, at least not yet (hopefully soon). The only thing you can do now is share your My Scenes…
And with that, let’s get to the summary…