King Kong
Peter Jackson follows up his Lord of the Rings
trilogy by bringing back the biggest ape of all, and recreates Depression-Era
New York City superbly in the process.
In this modern age of CGI and special effects,
bringing back King Kong in 1930s mode is a tough act, and director Peter Jackson
brilliantly brings the beast to the screen. The downside: the film is three
hours long.
Just about everything in this
new remake is hyperbolized. The film opens with a melange of 1930s starvation
scenes as a way of underscoring the plight of Vaudeville comedienne Anne Darrow
(Naomi Watts) as she swipes an apple and is saved from arrest by desperate film
director Carl Denham (Jack Black). He likes her mostly because she can fill the
size 4 dresses that his would-be star left behind when she dropped his
production.
Denham snookers her into his
production and onto the ailing bucket of a ship, The Venture, along with
playwright Jack Driscoll (Adrian Brody), not telling any of them that they are
off to the uncharted Skull Island. Jackson makes the islanders quite sinister
and dreadful, all skin and bones and stringy hair and dry skin. Ann is offered
up to King Kong as a sacrifice, but unlike the other meals before her, she
provides a show. She uses her Vaudeville act to charm the beast; in the
original, the big ape simply loved her because she was purty. In this regard, we
see how she charms Kong with her comedy skills and defiance, and he in turn
saves her from becoming the meal of several T-Rex dinosaurs. The love affair of
sorts continues on in New York. The film's best scene, in which Kong "skates" on
a frozen park lake with Ann in his paw, is one of the most humane and humanizing
moments in the film, and in any of the King Kong
adaptations.
The downside to the film is
that the effects of videogames on entertainment is quite apparent here. While
the rather short original (less than 90 minutes) shows dinosaurs and the famous
log scene, this edition gives us not one but three T-Rex scenes with Kong
fighting them on land and on vines. And no sooner are we done with the
dinosaurs, but the rescue party is decimated by brontosaurs, velociraptors, and
giant insects and worms. Then, just when you think it might be time to relax,
there are the giant bats. Mind you, I found all of this fighting against nature
gone gigantic thrilling; I was squirming in my seat, viscerally reacting to the
action, in a way I did NOT during any of the Lord of the Ring
films.
The other big star here is New
York in the 1930s. it's amazing how today's film technology can show all of
Manhattan from Midtown to the Battery as it might look in the 1930s, taking
various newer towers out of the landscape.
Posted: Sun - December
25, 2005 at 12:52 AM