Maybe I'm blinded by nostalgia but I adore this movie.
It's one of the few movies for me that is truly and action movie and not just a movie with some gun fire and general badassdom. The action sequences are captivating, electrifying and operatic in their scale and execution.
On top of this, the sense of adventure as we travel from a vivid (and probably fake) evocation of 1930s New York to the eerie island forgotten by time is realized with an artisanal attention to detail and an artist's spark and passion (though of course all movies are art).
A lot of people felt it took a while to get going. But I like local color and characters that make this feel all the more vivid. They do it with verve when so many other monster movies spend too much time on humans when they only know how to write the monsters.
The love story angle part might have been a tad much but I like Ann, I like Jack, I love to look down my nose at Carl and Hayes and the boy are a sweet addition too.
You will fear and in time come to love this endling ape who reigns as king of the forgotten world but but rules it alone. When Naomi Watts described it as a love story I dare say it might have been the most inciteful thing an actor has ever said about one of their movies that they didn't write in an interview. It's no an erotic love but in the bleak world of giant sabre toothed leach eat giant sabre toothed leach, sometimes moments of tenderness between the most unlikely pairs becomes possible.
And then we get back to New York and words do not do it justice. They kind of slapped a Christmas/Winter aesthetic in the final act because this movie released in December and I am so happy to go along with it, maybe because of that score.
Overall, one of the few remakes of a good movie that is justified since it managed to recreate for modern audiences what the original would have been at its time.
