King Kong

King Kong, the original 1933 film, is one of my favorite movies. It’s a breathless action-adventure film filled with the stuff of dreams and nightmares made fully realized. And it accomplished something that few special effects heavy films can lay claim to: it gave its central creation, a creature that is only a puppet moved one frame at a time, a real soul. There is a naïve sense of wonder, of rollicking adventure delivered at a break-neck speed. The movie barely stops long enough for us to gasp before we’re running into our next monster battle, our next rampage, and our next big thrill. It laid the groundwork for this 2003 remake…which never should have been made.

Yes, The Lord of the Rings film trilogy can lay claim that it created a character out of special effects and gave him a soul, and that character is obviously Gollum, but that doesn’t mean that Kong needed to be reimagined in our digital age. Did Peter Jackson learn nothing from the truly atrocious 70s remake?

It’s plain as day to the modern eye that the original Kong is nothing but a furry puppet, but there is something so charismatic about the animation of that puppet that retains its magical power. Jackson’s Kong is a visual wonder, but I was always aware that I was watching an impressive technological achievement. I can’t pin-point the exact reason for this, but I think it has to do with the design of the creatures. Each one is embellished yet rendered in an ultra-realistic style. We clearly know that a gorilla’s proportions (no matter how out-sized) will never reach the distortions of Kong. We also know that the dinosaurs on Skull Island are all wrong, scientifically speaking. But we see that they’ve been animated to move and be as textured as real as possible. It creates a great distance.

There is also the problem of length. At three hours long, Jackson hasn’t edited anything out of his storyline. Which is unfortunate because somewhere within this bloated monster of a movie is a great one wanting to come out. As it stands, it’s only good by half. Told in three acts at an hour each, some serious revising needed to be done. I don’t need an hour’s worth of explanation about our three main characters. What the first movie economically did in about twenty minutes, this one takes around sixty. And we’re dealing with the same handful of characters for the first two-thirds of the film. And what happens once we get back to New York? We’re never given any closure, updates or information about the fates of our survivors. I’ve just spent two hours with these characters, and you can’t continue on their story? Why introduce characters if you’re not going to satisfactorily conclude their plot line? It’s a lazy writing mistake from a writer-director given carte blanche over a passion project.

Ego is the true enemy of the version of Kong and his one-sided love affair. The sluggish paces of first and last thirds of the film aren’t their only problems. Numerous scenes go nowhere and add nothing to the overall storyline. A scene where Kong takes Anne ice skating is unintentional hilarious when it is supposed to be touching and tender. It is completely and utterly unnecessary.

And fresh off the operatic sword-and-sorcery epicness of Rings, Jackson has mistaken that everything is better with a bigger scale. Kong was a simplistic story. A fairy tale story of a beast that loved a beauty that did not love him back, but filled with thrills and chills. That Anne loves the beast in this version is but a symptom of its problems. The great tragedy of the original King Kong, and it was a tragedy in the end, was that the beast so fiercely protected and sought out Anne while all she wanted to do was run in the other direction and get as far away from him as possible. But who wouldn’t? A giant gorilla has chosen you for its affections. These bells and whistles turn a silk purse into a sow’s ear.

This goes into the visuals as well as the story. Why is so much of this movie a CGI-generated mess? Blue lines are visible around the actors during scenes set during sunset. Characters try valiantly to interact with shrubbery and jungle floral and fauna that are never really there. In Rings and the original Kong these things mesh seamlessly. As wonderful as some of it looks some of it also looks embarrassingly cheap.

Notice that I have said nothing of the actors. Well, it’s hard to create a fully realized performance in a film that puts razzle-dazzle on center stage. And some actors are also just horrendously miscast. Adrien Brody as our romantic action hero? It’s all wrong. Jack Black as our Orson Welles stylized director? Stick to juvenile comedies dear. Colin Hanks and Jamie Bell are wasted in thankless roles. As is Kyle Chandler, but at least he looks like he’s trying to have a good time. Evan Park is given a thankless role as the racist trope of moralizing black man who’s among the first to die. At least in 1933 that kind of stuff was expected. And Naomi Watts tries her best to make the whole thing float and give it some kind of emotion, but she’s just a cog in Jackson’s epic masturbatory film construct. And Andy Serkis’ performance as Kong pales in comparison to his work as Gollum. Kong here is a 99% CGI creation. None of Serkis’ performance shines through, so what was the point of hiring him in the first place?

Jackson should consider scaling back with future films (The Hobbit withstanding), because of this visual and aural stimuli is too much for some stories. Like this one. He had a huge hit with Rings, deservedly so, and he cleaned up at the Oscars for that trilogies grand finale, again, deservedly so. But he just didn’t know when to quit.