[Whoops! I told someone I saw this at the Provo Town Center Mall. Memory lapse; it was at the Dollar Theater northeast of the University Mall.]

[Another update: okay, way flipping with the vitriol from me again. I liked the beginning and end of this film. I was at times moved. And apparently this is a film that goes either way: either a person loves (or likes) the middle and hates the beginning and end or hates the middle and likes the beginning and end. I’m in the latter group.]

My wife and I went to see KING KONG at the dollar theater last night, long after reading this scathing review and hearing my coworkers in contrast rave about the film. Everything else in theaters right now is unenticing, except for perhaps WORLD’S FASTEST INDIAN and FIREWALL - and maybe 16 BLOCKS. I recently peeked in on VENDETTA and CHURCH BALL. Snore, snore.

KING KONG was unmitigated senselessness.

I liked the beginning and the end. My coworkers generally take the opposite response.

As I watched this film, I got very angry at it. Question for the writers, among them the director: What happens when you send twenty giant, frightened brontausaurs stampeding through a narrow canyon after twenty humans? Their answer: The brontosaurs end up flopping and rolling over each other in an extended orgy of so much rolling, pasty flesh, and a few humans die in the process.

What happened to narrative limitations!? All of the humans would be pulverized in the first ten seconds! I just lost it after this. The only reason I continued watching at all was to sate my sense of superiority in the parade of unending violent indulgences that threw even the most elementary intuitions about physics out the window and assaulted most senses of decency. It demanded a level of suspension of disbelief which most people left behind when they turned five. I’m all for childlike imagination, but this was an extended tantrum, and speaking of five, someone had what looked like their four and five year old kids in the theater to watch all this. Legal or not (I think maybe it shouldn’t be), exposing a child to this level of intensity and horror is just child abuse. You do not let your child watch a man be slowly ingested by five giant worms, one of them slowly wrapping its mouth around the man’s head until he can no longer scream.

Grettir is right, the woman’s brain would turn to jelly with all that “baby shaking” - and I wholeheartedly agree with his review. At one point a reason for exploring the island is offered: “There’s still some mystery left in the world.” What we discover only solves the mystery of how much violent garbage the American public will tolerate while still continuing to take any of it seriously at all. Knowing people who rave about this film, I start to fear the answer to the mystery of tolerable violence is just “more, more, more!”

I felt like I had to apologize to myself over and over again for being suckered into watching this GARBAGE. My wife said it best: it was Jurrassic Park without a conscience.