Please, if you haven't seen the movie don't read my King Kong review. This review contains spoilers because it talks about specific special effects.

King Kong is seems like an unnecessarily long film, and that's not a good thing. It's an action film and yet there's all of this time spent on story that could have been tightened up. There are also unnecessarily long shots of locations/scenes that could have been shortened.

All three Lord of the Rings movies were long but they didn't feel long until the last half hour (at which point, all three dragged on). At King Kong, I was getting restless an hour into the film when they hadn't even left New York yet!. We all know what happens at the end of King Kong, so delaying the final payoff scene just seems silly to me.

My other main issue with King Kong were the special effects but before I get into that I'll tell you the ones I liked: King Kong himself was flawless. His hair, his movements, his behaviour was all very believable. The fights with other CG characters like the dinosaurs looked really good but were too long with too little payoff at the end of them.

Problem areas included the full shots of Kong where he's holding Ann Darrow and she's moving in his hand. The mix between CG and Darrow just didn't look good, they could have (and should have) done much much better. Another unrealistic part was the men running with the dinosaurs when the "camera" faces them. Again, the mix between the dinosaurs legs and the real men just didn't look realistic, and it took away from the film.

I lost some patience with King Kong early on and didn't get it back until Kong escaped at the end of the movie, which was really cool and pretty much the only part of the movie that didn't feel slow pace-wise. Overall, a it was a decent movie but it's a heck of a long time to wait for an action payoff.

The last thing I didn't like was Ann Darrow standing on the top of the Empire State Building with Kong and a slow breeze wisping through her hair. I don't care if it's morning and there's no wind on the ground, it's going to be damn windy at the top of the Empire State Building. So windy you can't just stand on it with high heels on. As cool as those scenes were, that point just bothered me.