Kong: Skull Island | March 10, 2017 | Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, John Goodman | Crosses 500M WW

[Ozymandias]

2 hours ago, Nutella of Arabia said:

Well, also in part because his KONG was an effort to LOTR-ize the story. 

 

He tried to LOTR-ize The Hobbit, going as far as bringing back Sauron.

 

Kong doesn't feel like a conflicted movie.  Long ass movie that could use some trimming? Yes.

[Cmasterclay]

Jackson's Kong was a little long and could have used another run (or five) through the editor's room, but honestly I'd certainly say the same for ROTK just as much and even for Fellowship a bit. All of those movies kicked fucking ass in spite of it, dude was a genius at the time. The real question is what happened to the dude? Lovely Bones was AWFUL. And the Hobbit? Hot take incoming, but they're as bad as the Star Wars prequels. I think they're a total mess with a few pretty decent parts minced in. What happened to Jackson's directorial skills? His 90s movies were awesome, too. He just directed Kong and then fell off a fucking cliff in the span of just a few years. It's inexplicable. I'll chalk it up to ego and too much control once he got big. 

[The Futurist]

I am not big fan of the Hobbit but Jackson s creativity when it comes to action & set pieces remain intact & way above the norm, let s get real for a second here.

 

 

[Ozymandias]

Jackson refused to make the Hobbit for a long time.  He wanted to make LOTR since he was a kid.  He shopped LOTR and all of them turned him down until he went to New Line.  He was hungry and determined to get it made.  LOTR was in pre-production for 4 years and took 2 years to shoot.  He may have felt like LOTR was the entree and the Hobbit was a side of potato chips so his heart wasn't fully in it.  Fuck I don't know.

[grim22]

29 minutes ago, The Futurist said:

I am not big fan of the Hobbit but Jackson s creativity when it comes to action & set pieces remain intact & way above the norm, let s get real for a second here.

 

 

 

 

 

When I saw the Tom & Jerry chase scene with Smaug and the dwarves, that is exactly what i thought - "this action scene is so far from the norm, it isn't even funny anymore"

 

Both Jackson's Kong as well as Hobbit suffered from an over extended first act. The boat and the Dwarves singing during dinner went on for way too long and just killed the movie's momentum even before they got going.

[filmlover]

He probably made The Hobbit movies because they felt safe after the misguided flop that was The Lovely Bones.

[The Futurist]

Somewhere at Weta, thousands of drawings supervized by Guillermo del Toro are waiting to be discovered... 

 

[Arlborn]

So I'm the only one who really enjoyed the Hobbit trilogy?

 

Eh, okay then, carry on.

[Jake Gittes]

I only really enjoyed two scenes in the entire Hobbit trilogy, the dwarves' introduction/dinner and Riddles in the Dark. The rest was excruciating, and it got worse as it went along. 

 

ROTK and Kong were the ultimate Jackson blockbusters, he had nowhere further to go after them and should have stuck to smaller budgets and runtimes, even after The Lovely Bones was a disappointment. Right now I'm honestly wondering if The Hobbit left him so burned out he doesn't even know how to go back to normal again.

[4815162342]

2 hours ago, Ozymandias said:

 

He tried to LOTR-ize The Hobbit, going as far as bringing back Sauron.

 

Well to be fair LOTR the novels retconned the Hobbit into saying that the reason Gandalf disappeared for half the book was because he was off confronting Sauron.

[4815162342]

10 minutes ago, Arlborn said:

So I'm the only one who really enjoyed the Hobbit trilogy?

 

[Jake Gittes]

51 minutes ago, Ozymandias said:

Jackson refused to make the Hobbit for a long time.  He wanted to make LOTR since he was a kid.  He shopped LOTR and all of them turned him down until he went to New Line.  He was hungry and determined to get it made.  LOTR was in pre-production for 4 years and took 2 years to shoot.  He may have felt like LOTR was the entree and the Hobbit was a side of potato chips so his heart wasn't fully in it.  Fuck I don't know.

 

This. It's all about his own enthusiasm. He was crazy about getting Kong made too, hell he wanted to do it even before LOTR in the mid-90s. The Hobbit was a totally different story.

[CoolioD1]

thought the first hobbit was really fun. other two got on my nerves big time. only turned up to that 3rd one cos i like hfr and you know no one else is doing it.

 

king kong is great. not as good as the '33 version tho just for its leanness. it's kinda weird how they managed to make the depiction of the skull island villagers more racist 70 years later.

 

this looks ok. not really vibing with it aesthetically like i was with godzilla. I'm sure it'll be a fun 2 hours. i know people hate jokes because 2 hours of dim lighting and grumpy faces is what makes a movie adult to them but reilly looks fun. like a steve brule take on dennis hopper in Apoc now. 

[Cmasterclay]

Even the praised action scenes in the Hobbit kind of suck. The boat chase, the dwarfs running from Smaug, the Goblin King scene in the first....all of them felt like something out of fucking Donkey Kong. Jackson directed every action scene like a platform video game. The first Smaug introduction was great, though. And so was him destroying the Lake Town, even if it was poorly edited into the context of the larger story. And obviously the Gollum scene killed. But otherwise......yeesh. I think there's about an hour or two of good stuff in a seven hour trilogy. 

[elcaballero]

3 minutes ago, Cmasterclay said:

Even the praised action scenes in the Hobbit kind of suck. The boat chase, the dwarfs running from Smaug, the Goblin King scene in the first....all of them felt like something out of fucking Donkey Kong. Jackson directed every action scene like a platform video game. The first Smaug introduction was great, though. And so was him destroying the Lake Town, even if it was poorly edited into the context of the larger story. And obviously the Gollum scene killed. But otherwise......yeesh. I think there's about an hour or two of good stuff in a seven hour trilogy. 

Smaug destroying Laketown would have been great if it was the ending of the second movie instead of the beginning of the third.

[Jake Gittes]

All these years later I still wish GDT would have stuck around for another six months and got to make his two-film adaptation (presumably with both films being not much longer than 2 hours). Especially since I don't care for Pacific Rim at all.

[Ozymandias]

6 minutes ago, 4815162342 said:

 

Well to be fair LOTR the novels retconned the Hobbit into saying that the reason Gandalf disappeared for half the book was because he was off confronting Sauron.

 

I know, but it just feels off.  At the start of LOTR, you get the sense that most people either thought Sauron was gone for good or never even existed after 3000 years and are in complete shock when they realized he survived.  Instead, he showed up just 60 years earlier with a huge army at the lonely mountain and battled Gandalf, Galadriel, Elrond, and Saruman, who are pretty much the caretakers of ME.

[Goffe]

58 minutes ago, grim22 said:

 

When I saw the Tom & Jerry chase scene with Smaug and the dwarves, that is exactly what i thought - "this action scene is so far from the norm, it isn't even funny anymore"

 

Both Jackson's Kong as well as Hobbit suffered from an over extended first act. The boat and the Dwarves singing during dinner went on for way too long and just killed the movie's momentum even before they got going.

 

 

 

 

 

honestly, Smaug (and his introduction) vs Dwarves was, by far, the highlight of the franchise. Pure filmmaking magic. 

Edited November 23, 2016 by Goffe

[Cmasterclay]

Also, I don't think I've ever given less of a fuck about characters in a major movie franchise than the Hobbit. Martin Freeman and McKellan were great and all, but even them - it all ends up good for those guys, and we already know exactly HOW it ends up good before the movie even starts. The dwarfs were awful. Terrible. I couldn't care less about a single one of them. ESPECIALLY Thorin Oakenshield. Bunny rabbit man and Legolas' dad/brother whatever he was? Hokey as shit. I say all of this to emphasize how astonishingly poor these movies were for someone who made three masterpieces in the same damn franchise nine years before. 

[4815162342]

1 minute ago, Ozymandias said:

 

I know, but it just feels off.  At the start of LOTR, you get the sense that most people either thought Sauron was gone for good or never even existed after 3000 years and are in complete shock when they realized he survived.  Instead, he showed up just 60 years earlier with a huge army at the lonely mountain and battled Gandalf, Galadriel, Elrond, and Saruman, who are pretty much the caretakers of ME.

 

I agree to a point, that was an unavoidable problem of doing LOTR first than adjusting Hobbit after the fact.

 

Doing Hobbit first and working in some LOTR ties then, and acknowledging those ties in LOTR would have been cleaner.

 

That said, tying in Azog/Bolg to Sauron wasn't a bad idea, since in the book Bolg leads Goblins and Wargs to the Mountain just because he wants All The Treasure.