It was good but could have been great. The movie is just too long (197 minutes!!!!) and that causes an uneven emotional experience. I liked the lead-up to the journey to Skull Island and the journey itself. But the time on Skull Island was just too much. Did we really need to see so many different action scenes consecutively? It was fatiguing and consumed about 45 minutes of time tha could have been better spent through deletion. Allison and I both started dozing off mid-way through Skull Island! As a result, the burgeoning empathy between Ann Darrow and King Kong gets short-circuited (which is a shame because Naomi Watts was absolutely brilliant). Other than that you can see why Peter Jackson is probably one of the best directors in the business from his attention to detail (great close-ups at the right times) and juxtapositions of mechanical actions (like the steam turbines) and natural phenomena (the waves) with the charaters' dialogue. Great acting from the cast overall. There's the aforementioned Ms. Watts, but I especially liked the crew of the Venture (the captain, the "cook", Hayes and Jimmy). And Baxter did a very good job at being craven yet opportunistically daring. The chemistry between Adrien Brody and Naomi Watts wasn't quite there, but Brody was very good as Driscoll (he was especially good at conveying that "resigned to his fate but will make the best of it" feeling. I don't really care for Jack Black in general, but he did a great job at conveying Denham's amoral and calculating nature - kind of a Faustian Marlow if you can imagine such a combination.