Jax Nova wrote:
And yeah, I honestly have never seen any other film by PJ so I have no idea his film history but it does seem odd to go from that to LOTR
I have not seen any of his previous movies as far as I can remember. Nor do I know whether their range ever extended beyond a cult following (some seem to have garnered positive reviews, like Quentin Tarantino’s films despite their often extreme violence – the people the story is about are simply not pacifists!). But perhaps at least in one sense choosing PJ was a good idea, in that very few people had expectations attached to his name. That might have been quite different for “The Hobbit” had Guillermo del Toro actually directed the (two) movies.
What I do have is PJ’s version of “King Kong” (2005), as per Wiki the third of by now four films (No. 4: “Kong: Skull Island”, released in March 2017!) following the original story (most of the other films seem to tend towards the pathetic rip-off-and-cash-in-on-a-previous-success category, or worse). I have also seen the original 1933 with Fay Wray (whose real-life scream would probably have sent a real-life KK running off with burst eardrums!) and the 1976 version with Jessica Lange (with KK, heading for the tallest structure in NYC, naturally climbs the WTC Twin Towers).
I have a 2-DVD “limited” Edition, with some very interesting historical stuff on NYC in the 1930s (PJ placed his movie in the same era as the original, unlike the other two versions), and a pseudo-scientific “History of Skull Island” which I found very enjoyable. Like LoTR, only possible to film when CGI had reached a certain level - and Weta Digital pushed a lot of boundaries outward - most of what happened on – and the critters of – Skull Island could only by then be depicted with visual realism. I still have a ton of respect for the stop-motion stuff in the 1933 original, whose tradition is nowadays kept alive by “Wallace and Gromit”, “Chicken Run” and “Shaun the Sheep”.
