God, do I agree.

Why is it pointless to hate this movie rather than any movie? I went in with the expectation of at least being entertained. Instead, I found it tedious, didn't care in the least about the fate of any character, didn't find it particularly visually appealing, thought the dialogue was painful, thought the attempts at eliciting emotion were ham-fisted and obvious and insulting to even the most basely sentient viewer, etc. Are there ways I could imagine it as a good film on its own terms? Sure. Do I think this one is any good? No. Plenty of friends of mine loved it, and though I can't yet figure out how they could do so, I shrug and move on. But I haven't disliked a film I've seen this strongly in quite a while, and there's nothing "pointless" to that; it is what it is.

"Some of the dinosaur fights went on too long"

I can't parse this phrase. Can you recompose?

So, it seems pointless to me because it seems to me that the movie was exactly what it was advertised to be. Hating it for being a silly, cartoonish, over-the-top effects spectacle is like hating “Buckaroo Banzai” for its lack of scientific rigor, or hating a Michael Swanwick story for having a protagonist who badly needs to have his ass kicked. It comes with the territory.

It's not like the original had some amazing story to begin with. It's a movie about an animated giant ape, tearing the shit out of things. If you go into Kong expecting to see anything more than that, you've fallen for Hollywood marketing. Not every movie is going to be some great epic tale.

And taking Jackson to task for being indulgent? Christ, we're not going to let artists endulge themselves once and a while now? I think if anyone deserves it, it's that guy. He busted his ass on the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I am not going to begrudge him a little endulging in a movie that inspired him to become a filmmaker.

I haven't seen Kong, but it seems to me that it's possible to go in expecting good mindless entertainment and be disappointed at finding bad mindless entertainment. People can disagree over whether a given movie falls in the former or latter categories, but are you saying that it's meaningless to make that distinction?

(Note that I'm not saying this is what Matt's -- or anyone else's -- expectations were.)

No. I have a relatively high tolerance for bad mindless entertainment, but there clearly is such a thing. (Viz. Revenge of the Sith, Hulk, etc.)

In this particular case, though, it’s hard for me to see how someone could seriously complain about Kong’s simplistic dialogue or its lack of character depth or its blatant emotional manipulation or its self-indulgent action scenes without judging it as something other than that. (I think those complaints are to some extent justified with respect to the second and third LOTR films, for instance.)

Some of the other criticisms, like Edward Champion’s complaint that the character of Kong had no soul, just make me wonder if we saw the same movie. But he seems to have found the special effects flaws (and there were a fair number) more consistently irritating than I did; maybe my higher tolerance for that meant I wasn’t thrown out of the film as often.

I think the only argument that can plausibly be made against Kong, as mindless entertainment, would be that it takes too long to get to Skull Island. I didn’t personally mind that, but I can see how someone would.

Then again, I’m the guy that said the problem with Hulk was “Too much action, not enough talk.”

While I didn't hate the movie, I was really appalled by how unselfconsciously racist it is. I mean it's shocking to me that none of the writers/director/producers etc noticed or cared that they showed an entirely white New York City, killed off the one speaking black character as soon as possible, and had the black natives resembling zombie orcs. What the hell is Peter Jackson's problem? Kwane McKenzie says it more eloquently here.

Yeah, I knew the black sailor wasn’t going to make it, but oy. I thought the “natives” could have been worse, but I don’t know if that’s really true, or if I was just projecting as positive a spin as I could onto them . . . and there sure didn’t seem to be much effort toward trying to find some novel and creative way to deal with the idea.

(For instance, were they supposed to have been the descendants of the people who built the walls? That’s my preferred reading, but maybe not Jackson’s; and particularly after reading these discussions about images of Africa in fiction, it occurs to me that to “contemporary” readers they would clearly have been mere squatters in the ruins of some vanished “white” civilization.)

For what it’s worth, NYC was a good deal whiter in the 30s than it is now. But I still feel like a shit for not noticing that in the film. Well spotted.

My problem with the movie was this: while they were pretty much continuously attacked from when the stampede began until everyone but the hero decided to leave, the hero managed to sneak into Kong's lair without being attacked, and he and the heroine managed to get out without being attacked. Not even once.

What, the entire island took a sleeping pill while they were trying to escape?

No, your problem with the movie is that you’re looking for logic. :)

(No, I noticed that, too. Um... maybe the island’s smaller than it looked and we actually saw all the monsters on it? Or maybe it was just siesta time?)