One of the greatest movies of the
greatest decade in American film, the original King Kong addresses not only its own time, but perhaps all time —
beyond its importance in the art of motion pictures, the great ape haunts the
imagination, dwarfing all the other monsters in the crowded population of movie
creatures. The remarkable development of contemporary motion picture
technology, along with the general paucity of ideas, suggests the inevitability
of the new remake; the choice of Peter Jackson, the man responsible for the
grandeur of the Lord of the Rings saga, to direct it seems positively inspired.
Set in the 1933 of the original,
which possessed a special relevance, the new version employs essentially the
same plot and people, but provides a good deal more background and exposition
before it launches its characters on their voyage to SkullIsland, domain of monsters, the kingdom
of Kong. The director turns Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), immortalized
by Fay Wray, into a dancer and juggler in a vaudeville comedy act, a bit that
comes in handy on the island when she charms her abductor. He shows Carl Denham
(Jack Black) running out on his creditors, bouncing checks, and tricking Jack
Driscoll (Adrien Brody) into accompanying him aboard
the ship to write the movie that will in effect become something like King Kong.
More important for most audiences,
the picture spends a considerable amount of time — and its enormous budget
— on those special effects that in our time too often pass for filmmaking.
The various dinosaurs, gigantic vampire bats, and huge, disgusting insects make
the new SkullIsland,
where evolution stopped (think Kansas),
more dangerous, more frightening, and more real than
the models on the old studio back lot. Because all sorts of digital wizardry
now replaces the puppets, stop motion animation, forced perspective, and matte
shots of the past, all those menaces move with speed and a smooth and sinuous
grace.
While retaining (and enhancing) most
of the essential scenes and sequences from the original, the director adds a
number of prolonged encounters between the crew and a whole zoo full of
grotesque creatures. He shows a lengthy dinosaur stampede right out of Jurassic Park, another picture inspired
by the original, and a particularly intense battle between the humans and a
swarm of enormous insects — grasshoppers, cockroaches, scorpions, centipedes
— that crawl all over the horrified men. Perhaps most disgusting, a dozen
huge lampreys pop out of a pond and attempt to devour the crew, engulfing their
heads and sucking them in like giant, toothed vacuum cleaners.
The picture naturally must revolve
around the title character, the giant ape who abducts
Ann Darrow and famously falls in love with his
captive. Thanks to state-of-the-art technology, Peter Jackson’s Kong moves more
rapidly and athletically than his predecessor and appears even more powerful,
battling numerous beasts and destroying large portions of the landscape in a
fit of pique. Once again, of course, the beauty and spirit of his lovely victim
charm him into some sort of gorilla tranquillity as
he regards her, in Jack Kerouac’s words, with huge eyes of tender love, and
once again, her presence ultimately causes his defeat and death.
When the survivors capture Kong and
bring him back to New York to
face his destiny, the picture again follows the original, even to the final
confrontation atop the EmpireStateBuilding. There Jackson’s work
betrays his own failures of imagination, as he slows down the action and
prolongs and repeats just about every shot, turning the exciting conclusion
into an excruciatingly sluggish display of sentimentality. The chained beast’s
savage rage against civilization, mechanism, capitalism, the symbolic
revolutionary gesture of the Great Depression, turns into soppy pathos and
mawkish banality.
Except for Adrien
Brody, who comports himself with restraint and a measure of irony, the acting
demonstrates a good deal of confusion. The cast cannot seem to decide whether
to play for laughs or for real, whether to camp it up or satirize the whole
business; as a result, Jack Black atrociously seems to be impersonating a
sinister and demented Orson Welles and Naomi Watts
spends most of her time weeping and looking soulful at the ape and Brody. Peter
Jackson now joins George Lucas and Steven Spielberg in that group of directors
who substitute technology for imagination, mechanical, optical, chemical, and digital
tricks for good writing and clear thinking.
King Kong (PG-13), directed by Peter
Jackson, is playing at Canandaigua Theatres, Geneseo Theatres, Greece
Ridge 12, Henrietta 18, PittsfordPlaza,
Tinseltown
This article appears in Dec 21-27, 2005.
