It doesn't have to be an Oscar contender, but there's a middle ground between that and a 2 hour video game like this. It's sad but it seems like people have forgotten that you can make a movie like this that's actually GOOD. Jurassic Park, Close Encounters, Minority Report - pick any early era Spielberg film to see how you can have both spectacle and a human element. If you don't care about the characters, then all you have is a cartoon.
I'm not sure they are fair comparisons, as there are very few movies which have attempted to make the monsters the characters.
It's hardly like you cared about any of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, which was essentially just updating Jaws-by-way-of-Crichton. Of course you had to care about the humans in plight.
Transformers movies are a more apt comparison, where - beyond the first - the only characters you're likely to care about are Optimus and Bee, certainly none of the humans. Bumblebee did a better job, but it's still essentially just the one character, and the relationship there was not wholly unlike the Kong/girl thing they had going here.
So, sure, talk about combining spectacle and the human element, but don't forget that the 'humanity' you see in this movie comes from a rough-around-the-edges underdog brawler called Kong...