Peter Jackson's King Kong

[Dragon Warrior]

Well, PJ lovers (hehe, PJ), Peter Jackson is back from Lord of the Rings and has been making the movie "King Kong" for quite some while now. I've known this since the release of LOTR:ROTK, but I wasn't sure on certain facts. I pretty much only knew Jack Black starred in it (which some were shifty about since he only does comedy, really).

But now they have a special site up on it. [URL=http://www.kongisking.net/index.shtml]LINKAGE[/URL] is the site right there and you'll find many goodies about the film, including a video diary PJ is doing. I've watched some of the videos and they're awesome because they're showing what's happening on the production.

Plus, Andy Serkis (the man who played Gollum himself) has returned to do the CG animation for King Kong. Sweetage!

Any comments?

[Manic Webb]

I'm sure Peter Jackson is a competent director and he most likely won't ruin this movie, but do we honestly need [i]another[/i] remake of this film? I get it, King Kong is a good movie, film classic, cinematic history, ect. I mean, didn't we just have a remake 18 years ago? Followed by a sequel?

I still have hopes for this movie, though. I just needed to vent.

[Guest ScirosDarkblade]

I, on the other hand, think Peter Jackson is a piss-poor director that lets junk like hour-long battles take priority over acting and character development. He is the worst acting director besides George Lucas that I am aware of.

So if he wants to make another version of a movie about a big ape terrorizing a city, that's totally fine with me. As long as he doesn't start ruining any more actually GOOD franchises, I'm satisfied. I can only hope that after King Kong he somehow magically gets himself trapped in a neverending vortex of live-action adaptations of Dragonball or something so I never have to hear from him again.

[Brasil]

Ew. Just...ew. King Kong (1933) is my favorite movie of all-time, and...CG? Um, excuse me? If one were serious about crafting a quality King Kong remake, a remake that matches the original's excellence, one would find it useful to research the merits of stop-motion animation.

CG...bah. It's good for little things and brief inserts, but too much of it and the movie flunks. You don't need CG to do a King Kong movie; you just need stop-motion animation and various non-digital imaging techniques.

[Dragon Warrior]

Well, geez. The title of this thread isn't the "Flame Peter Jackson" thread XD Obviously people don't like his work. I, for one, loved the Frighteners, but just recently learned he made it.

Anyways, the CG will be good on King Kong. I've seen some stuff on it and it looks real. If you've seen LOTR, a lot of the more realistic stuff were CG, like Gollum. All Andy Serkis does is wear that funky suit again, does his acting, and in the movie it'll look like King Kong. Motion Capture has got to be the best type of CG work ever (thus far).

[James]

[color=#811C3A]I'm not really interested in King Kong at all, but this may be something I will check out at some point.

I loved The Frighteners -- a lot more than Lord of the Rings. Damn awesome movie.

As for the CG thing...I'm tired of the anti-CG bias. lol

CG is just as artistic and complicated as any other method of animation. Stop-motion is great, but it isn't somehow better than CG -- the director will obviously use whatever technique he feels is best.

Also, CG is advancing rapidly. The CG in LotR (particularly the third film) was extremely well done, and the interaction between CG and non-CG characters was smoother and more seamless than anything I've seen so far. The transition would also be a lot less jarring than a stop-motion > live action sequence. So yeah. The whole anti-CG thing is a relic of the past, I think. Directors like Stephen Spielberg, George Lucas and the Wachowskis recognize that CG can play an enormous role in film in the future, afterall.[/color]

[Gavin]

[SIZE=1]Interesting, most interesting.

Well I have to admit that I've never seen King Kong be that the original or it's remakes, the closest I've ever got to the series is the animated series [b]Kong[/b]. My own opinion of Jackson is that he is a competent director, because the only work he's done [to my knowledge] is the LOTR series I can't really make a solid decision. Honestly I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and go to see the film with an open mind, then I'll rent the original and probably call him lots of awful things because very few remakes are as good as the originals.

I agree with what James was saying, CGI has become an intricate part of film making, imagine Star Wars without CGI, imagine Jurassic Park without CGI. I'm not saying that an entire film needs to be shot using CGI, however it does have it's uses as does any other form of animation. As James pointed out without directors like Lucas and Spielberg who saw the potential that CGI had to offer we would have missed quite a few memorable cinematic moments over the years. Just for a moment try and imagine being as impressed if the fight between Yoda and Dooku in Attack of the Clones had been used with puppets and glowing sticks.[/SIZE]

[Brasil]

James, I'm not Anti-CG, necessarily, but CGI is really still in its infancy. Lucas, the LotR team, and the Wachowskis haven't hit the end-all, be-all of CG...far from it. The CG still looks fake, lol. It may look better nowadays, but there comes a point where if an entire movie is done in CG, or at least large portions of it, I know I start wondering why there's such an (over)abundance of CGI in there.

I'm fine with a few little inserts here and there (like T3's bathroom stall fight sequence), but honestly, I feel the all-time best creature effects have been done with good ole fashioned elbow grease and puppetry/animatronics/stop-motion.

There are a few high points for CG (T2 comes to mind, and snippets of Star Wars, LotR, Matrix), but overall, it hasn't advanced to the stage where entire films can utilize CG and no other types of conventional special effects and have it look good, and it's rare when it happens.

I look at something like (and oddly enough, half of these are Stan Winston projects, lol) John Carpenter's The Thing, or Alien/Aliens, Terminator, 2001, Nightmare Before Xmas, King Kong (1933), and there's this...physical tangibleness to the creatures. Rarely do I get that with CG, specifically the level of CG seen in Star Wars, Matrix, etc. There's no weight to the characters. CG looks more out of place in live-action than puppetry does.

I'm not against CG, far from it, but I'd much prefer the utilization of CG to be nonobtrusive as opposed to building scenes around it, if I'm explaining that correctly.

[James]

[color=#811C3A]Although it's obvious that much of LotR was CG (because it wouldn't be possible with any other type of animation or special effects technique), I don't think that it was jarring at all. LotR is the movie which has really managed to combine CG with live action in the most seamless way yet -- [i]particularly[/i] in regard to creature design. You can't tell me that Gollum's scuffle with Frodo is less realistic or believeable than someone running around with a dangling puppet on their back (which looks like a dead baby in certain scenes, lol).

Also, if you look at the original King Kong...obviously by standards of that time it looked great. But puppetry is a difficult balance. I mean, with Aliens, it works well because you are often just getting quick shots of the aliens themselves. You are also in a dark and moody atmosphere, which partially obscures the creatures. Also, by design, I think that the aliens themselves are probably easier to pull off with puppetry -- in the sense that it's probably easier to make the alien look real than it is to replicate a gorilla (something we've actually seen, versus something we've never seen). Does that make sense?

I understand that CGI isn't always "weighty", but honestly, I prefer the CG Yoda to the puppet Yoda any day. I'd only go for the puppet Yoda for nostalgic reasons. But in terms of what looks the most real -- what is the most believeable -- I'd go with the CG Yoda. I would say that the CG, as a tool or a means to an end, is going to more accurately represent the creator's vision.

I'm not attempting to say that CGI should be the solution to every visual effects problem...but honestly, if it's done right, it can be perfectly appropriate. I don't believe that a movie should deliberately avoid liberal use of CGI as long as the CGI is [i]good quality[/i]. And with each movie, it improves. So...I'm really not worried, particularly given the stellar CG work in LotR.[/color]

[Dragon Warrior]

I agree that puppets and all that look amazing (many of the Star Wars aliens were puppets/animatronics), but you can also look at creatures like Gollum and see how the CG has advanced. To me, Gollum looks very real. The point is, you know he's fake and that clouds your mind with the thought that he's fake, so he can't look real. I've always had that problem with certain aliens or something in movies. You've never actually seen those aliens in the movies before in real life, so you're not entirely sure if they look like the real thing or not.

I dunno if I'm making my point correctly XD