King Kong is a tender love-story between a girl and an ape, and by ape I don't mean Tom Sizemore; this simian is a REAL monster, a twenty-five-foot-high gorilla with a foul temper and a thing for blondes. His domain is Skull Island, a mysterious, fog-shrouded netherworld of jutting black-stone cliffs, colossal ruins carved by long-dead madmen and primeval jungle populated by a dizzying assortment of dinosaurs, insects and beings of seemingly alien origin. Kong, the last surviving member of a race of uber-apes, is a lonely soul, with nothing but a lot of giant bats and the bones of his dead companions for company. This all changes when the steamer arrives from far-off Depression-era New York, bringing with it an ambitious but broke filmmaker (Jack Black, miscast), a shanghaied playwright with a dashing streak (Adrien Brody, sleek and confident), and a golden-tressed, down-on-her-luck vaudevillian possessed of remarkably pungent pheromones (Naomi Watts, emotionally committed and radiant).
Director Peter Jackson has re-conceived the Hollywood classic King Kong as a piece of grand romantic hokum, employing his prodigious imagination and staggering cinematic command in making the creaky Kong scenario not only appealing to modern audiences, but exhaustingly thrilling, and quite emotionally satisfying as well. Despite its reputation as a girl-meets-giant-ape love story, the original Kong never had much to do with actual romance; it viewed the ape's thing for the lovely Anne Darrow (portrayed then by B-list star Fay Wray) as a kind of beastly erotic fixation, the monster as a wild-eyed jungle bogeyman whose ultimate vanquishment was less a gut-wrenching tragedy than a triumph of Western technology and pluck over the dark side of nature, the thing sprung from the bosom of the unknown. Audiences may have felt sympathy for Kong, but one gets the sense that this was purely an accident, that directors Ernest Schoedsack and Merian Cooper, and legendary creature-creator Willis O'Brien, never meant Kong to be anything other than a villain, his fascination with the pale, wispy Wray, the embodiment of Caucasian beauty, to be seen as anything less than aberrant. Peter Jackson does not repeat the mistake of the original Kong by expecting the audience not to identify with his big ape; he sets out to create in Kong a sympathetic creature, a noble warrior who has no one else left in the world, who discovers in his human companion someone to stoke his protective instincts, to make him feel like a king again. There's almost nothing erotic about the relationship between Kong and Anne Darrow in this incarnation of the story; instead of trying to lift her dress, Kong cradles Anne against his massive, hairy arm, and in a scene of stupefying romantic daring, takes her for a ride on an ice-skating pond in Central Park (Kong is captured by the sleazy director Carl Denham and shipped to New York as an attraction, and escapes his chains to seek out his lady-love). Jackson, never one for sub-text, has stripped away the nutty sex-appeal of the 1933 Kong and replaced it with a nutty sentimentalism, creating, in unlikely fashion, one of the sweeter, more innocent love fables in recent movie history. His Kong is unbelievably expressive (Andy "Gollum" Serkis is responsible for the basic movements, the gorilla body-language, which is pushed at times in a deliberately human direction) and lovingly rendered via state-of-the-art CGI (you can almost feel the moist, satiny texture of Kong's nose). Kong's scenes with Naomi Watts, whose performance is fantastically energetic, manage the trick of being emotionally credible despite remaining unconscionably silly.
Of course Jackson has a bigger agenda than just making a love-story for the ages; he also wants to scare the pants off his audience, and give them a thrill-ride, and show them things they've never seen before. Jackson, moviedom's consummate showman now that Spielberg has gotten all serious, is a believer in giving his customers their money's worth: Kong bestows upon us a vision of a pre-historic fantasy-land so lush in detail, so beautifully-realized, that the mind simply has no chance to drink it all in. Peter Jackson has perhaps a greater command of the means of modern-day action-cinema even than Spielberg, a genius for envisioning fantasy, and carrying out massively complex visual schemes, that frankly makes your head spin. His Skull Island is simply one of the most wondrous worlds ever created on film, and it achieves this stature because Jackson has absolutely no sense of restraint, and is always out to top himself. This is, of course, self-indulgent, but the great thing about self-indulgence is that when you tie it to epic talent you get something memorable. Does Kong go too far? Absolutely. Is there any way to justify its three-and-a-half-hour length? No. Is the sight of a herd of brontosaurs tumbling ass-over-tea-kettle down the side of a mountain something I'd pay for? Any day of the week, brother.
Maybe your bum begins to ache after sitting through almost an hour of set-up and character delineation (a lot of which could've been sheared away without detriment to the narrative), but the movie never really flags in its pace, because Jackson is such a master of visual flow, because he's so adept at fitting the pieces of his over-written story together, and making each little scene seem like it matters in the long-run even if it really doesn't. There's no question that Kong is a folly, a film that expends too much time and energy in almost every regard, that pushes the thrills harder than they need to be, that foists on the audience a love-story so improbable, so hokey, that one almost feels the movie's credibility slipping away - but it never does slip away, and that's the triumph of King Kong, a film that dares to walk a tightrope over the abyss of absurdity, and by a miracle of talent makes it safely to the other side.
Director Peter Jackson has re-conceived the Hollywood classic King Kong as a piece of grand romantic hokum, employing his prodigious imagination and staggering cinematic command in making the creaky Kong scenario not only appealing to modern audiences, but exhaustingly thrilling, and quite emotionally satisfying as well. Despite its reputation as a girl-meets-giant-ape love story, the original Kong never had much to do with actual romance; it viewed the ape's thing for the lovely Anne Darrow (portrayed then by B-list star Fay Wray) as a kind of beastly erotic fixation, the monster as a wild-eyed jungle bogeyman whose ultimate vanquishment was less a gut-wrenching tragedy than a triumph of Western technology and pluck over the dark side of nature, the thing sprung from the bosom of the unknown. Audiences may have felt sympathy for Kong, but one gets the sense that this was purely an accident, that directors Ernest Schoedsack and Merian Cooper, and legendary creature-creator Willis O'Brien, never meant Kong to be anything other than a villain, his fascination with the pale, wispy Wray, the embodiment of Caucasian beauty, to be seen as anything less than aberrant. Peter Jackson does not repeat the mistake of the original Kong by expecting the audience not to identify with his big ape; he sets out to create in Kong a sympathetic creature, a noble warrior who has no one else left in the world, who discovers in his human companion someone to stoke his protective instincts, to make him feel like a king again. There's almost nothing erotic about the relationship between Kong and Anne Darrow in this incarnation of the story; instead of trying to lift her dress, Kong cradles Anne against his massive, hairy arm, and in a scene of stupefying romantic daring, takes her for a ride on an ice-skating pond in Central Park (Kong is captured by the sleazy director Carl Denham and shipped to New York as an attraction, and escapes his chains to seek out his lady-love). Jackson, never one for sub-text, has stripped away the nutty sex-appeal of the 1933 Kong and replaced it with a nutty sentimentalism, creating, in unlikely fashion, one of the sweeter, more innocent love fables in recent movie history. His Kong is unbelievably expressive (Andy "Gollum" Serkis is responsible for the basic movements, the gorilla body-language, which is pushed at times in a deliberately human direction) and lovingly rendered via state-of-the-art CGI (you can almost feel the moist, satiny texture of Kong's nose). Kong's scenes with Naomi Watts, whose performance is fantastically energetic, manage the trick of being emotionally credible despite remaining unconscionably silly.
Of course Jackson has a bigger agenda than just making a love-story for the ages; he also wants to scare the pants off his audience, and give them a thrill-ride, and show them things they've never seen before. Jackson, moviedom's consummate showman now that Spielberg has gotten all serious, is a believer in giving his customers their money's worth: Kong bestows upon us a vision of a pre-historic fantasy-land so lush in detail, so beautifully-realized, that the mind simply has no chance to drink it all in. Peter Jackson has perhaps a greater command of the means of modern-day action-cinema even than Spielberg, a genius for envisioning fantasy, and carrying out massively complex visual schemes, that frankly makes your head spin. His Skull Island is simply one of the most wondrous worlds ever created on film, and it achieves this stature because Jackson has absolutely no sense of restraint, and is always out to top himself. This is, of course, self-indulgent, but the great thing about self-indulgence is that when you tie it to epic talent you get something memorable. Does Kong go too far? Absolutely. Is there any way to justify its three-and-a-half-hour length? No. Is the sight of a herd of brontosaurs tumbling ass-over-tea-kettle down the side of a mountain something I'd pay for? Any day of the week, brother.
Maybe your bum begins to ache after sitting through almost an hour of set-up and character delineation (a lot of which could've been sheared away without detriment to the narrative), but the movie never really flags in its pace, because Jackson is such a master of visual flow, because he's so adept at fitting the pieces of his over-written story together, and making each little scene seem like it matters in the long-run even if it really doesn't. There's no question that Kong is a folly, a film that expends too much time and energy in almost every regard, that pushes the thrills harder than they need to be, that foists on the audience a love-story so improbable, so hokey, that one almost feels the movie's credibility slipping away - but it never does slip away, and that's the triumph of King Kong, a film that dares to walk a tightrope over the abyss of absurdity, and by a miracle of talent makes it safely to the other side.