“The trouble [with King Kong] is that Jackson, an exuberant director, fresh from his triumph with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, likes to shoot up a storm, and here his exuberance spills over into senselessness,” writes David Denby in his New Yorker review. The Depression background, just a few shots in the original [Kong], is stretched out here with a montage of shantytowns and strikes; the black “natives” in Skull Island — filthy, grotesque and vicious — seem like escapees from a sideshow. In the original, Kong defends his blonde against dinosaurs for just a couple of scenes, but here the fights go on forever. Repeating what Spielberg has already accomplished in the Jurassic Park series, Jackson has fallen into a trap. Spectacle must be more and more astonishing or it creates as much as boredom as wonder, yet it’s not easy, as filmmakers are finding out, to top what others have delivered and stay within a disciplined narrative.”