Movie Reviews
If I was allowed to say only one thing about Peter Jackson�s new �King Kong,� it�d be that it�s one of the year�s finest films. Thankfully, I�ve been given more to say.
If it was unsure that Peter Jackson is a great director after �The Lord of the Rings,� it is no more. A lot of heavy hitters in Hollywood were ticked off when Jackson and his massive team of filmmakers swept the Oscars in 2004 for �The Return of the King,� because they felt that �The Lord of the Rings� was unworthy of such an honor. Like those films or not, they cemented Jackson into the annals of film history as a gifted director.
The funny thing is, Jackson�s favorite film is the original 1933 �King Kong� and he�s been working on a remake for years. In 1996, just after completing work on �The Frighteners,� Jackson and his entourage wrote a script for �Kong.� Not to mention they were well into the conceptual design and special effects testing of it when Tolkien�s little trilogy popped out of nowhere. So �Kong� was thrown to the side. Until now.
Or I guess I should say until two years ago. Jackson got virtually no down time in between �Rings� and �Kong.� Him and his fellow screenwriters, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, sat back down with the screenplay they had written for it in the 90s. They found a lot of schmuck. One-liners. Melodrama. An entire rewrite was set in motion. Thank God.
�King Kong� proclaims the advantages of special effects. Jackson�s team at Weta Digital is no stranger to new technologies; they�ve been writing software for new effects for years. �Kong�s� visual treatment does not look conceived through movie trickery. Instead, Jackson marries his live-action cast in with totally manufactured environments to such an astonishing degree that we forget we�re watching an effects film. We�re watching a love story. We�re watching a great movie.
I found it funny that this remake (the third of its kind) was so close to original (which runs roughly one hour and forty minutes) and yet it clocks in at three hours and ten minutes. Where did all that excess running time come from? Well when I say it like that � excess � it sounds negative. It�s not excess time, really. You see, the problem with the original �King Kong� is that it wanted to show us nothing but the action. Despite it being a classic, groundbreaking film, 1933�s version would be the equivalent to, say, a Michael Bay movie nowadays. What Jackson has done is taken the story and expanded nearly every part of it. All our characters have back stories. Even Kong himself.
When we reach Skull Island � nearly an hour into the film � desperate film director Carl Denham (Jack Black) and many-man crew have crashed their boat into a rock just on the shore of the Island. Inland, Denham and crew, including vaudeville performer-turn-walk on actress Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) and playwright Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) who fall for each other, have a run-in with the local natives. In the original, it�s implied that the natives are some sort of African or Polynesian tribe. Here, Jackson suggests that the locals are a people that have never been discovered. Their skin gleams with an off-color gray, and their eyes are white with eternal fear. The sudden arrival of white men does not go over very well. Some of Denham�s men are massacred before the rest of the ship�s crew bust in with guns blazing.
Ann is kidnapped by the natives and taken to the other side of a massive stone wall (which resembles Helm�s Deep on meth) where she is tied up and left as a sacrifice for the great Kong. When Driscoll finds out Ann is missing, he and the crew scavenge through uncharted territory across the wall, where they meet dinosaurs and other slimy creatures who take part in many of the men�s demise.
There is one minor difference in this new �King Kong� that changes everything. Kong takes Ann atop a cliff where they watch the sunset. After two-or-three too many escape attempts, Ann understands that she doesn�t have a chance at finding a way out, so she, of all things, performs her vaudeville act for Kong. Kong starts laughing and beating his chest in amusement. By the end of the act, Ann knows she can trust Kong. Good thing to know considering Kong has a lot of enemies on his own island, and many of them see Ann as supper. There�s a sensational sequence where Kong battles three tyrannosaurus rexes, which leads to a final showdown against just one of them. That final battle is much like the original, only in hyper drive.
The third act of the film unfolds as beautifully as anything I�ve seen all year. The relationship between Kong and Ann shies away from the unnatural romanticism of the original film. Ann loves Kong a lot like a woman would love her dog. Kong is a protective force � first protecting Ann from adversaries in his habitat, then in her habitat.
The scene atop the Empire State Building is a virtuoso experience, working as a piece of action, working as emotion, working almost as poetry. Where both the original and this remake succeed is treating Kong as a legitimate character that we have feelings for, whether those feelings be fear or love. That puts Jackson in a very special place: he�s created two very fictional, yet fully realized creatures, and made them both some of the most memorable characters in history (Kong and Gollum, both performed by Andy Serkis). And Peter Jackson is the most imaginative and resourceful director working today. ****