[Okay, I tried to spoiler-proof the post using fancy CSS skills, and lost. Though, I'm not really sure why I bothered to try to spoiler a review of a movie that basically everybody knows the plot to: giant ape steals pretty blonde lady, climbs up Empire State Building, gets owned by fighter planes. Regardless, if you want to know what I thought of this movie (as opposed to, say, people that write for the New York Times or other reputable critics), but don't want to read about specific changes that Peter Jackson made to this updated version, just skip down to the recommendation at the end and try not to read all the junk in between. Yeah.]
Yesterday afternoon, after napping for several hours upon completion of finals, I got up and went to see King Kong, the new epic remake by Peter Jackson. It’s not a movie I would ordinarily feel like seeing – I never saw the original, and I’m not usually a big fan of monster movies from the 30′s with somewhat racist subtext (“oh noes! That monster has stolen a white woman! Let’s git ‘em!”) – but I’d seen nothing but good reviews of it, and my roomies were going.
It was actually pretty enjoyable, though much longer than I expected a movie about a giant gorilla to be (run time is something like 3 hours and 25 minutes!). My roommate Simon wasn’t too fond of it, having seen the original, because he thought they made the gorilla too sympathetic – I didn’t have as much of a problem with that, though, as that change made it less of a film-with-mildly-racist-undertones and more of a fun Hollywood epic.
There was a lot to enjoy in the movie, mostly in the second third of the movie (island part), and that included scenes like when Kong beats the everliving fuck out of three T-Rexes one handed, holy shit did he just snap that T-rex’s jaw in half, that was AWESOME. Also, the cinematography, though I admittedly know nothing about cinematography, I thought was pretty impressive at times. The beginning montage of New York city was pretty neat: the bustle of the city, the vaudeville and theatre shows, interspliced with images of slum towns and the poverty of New York in the Depression era. One visual that I particularly liked was of Jack Driscoll trapped in the cage on the boat, typing. The orange lamp glow and the stark black lines, and the tiltedness of the scene from the motion of the boat, all added to the visual effect. Very Kafka-esque. Also, the moment the boat approaches the island shrouded in mist, and they discover the huge ass wall that the natives have built to section off the Kong, is magical.
Of course, I’m kind of a bitch when it comes to movies, so there are a number of things in the movie that didn’t work for me. The main thing that irked me was the abundance of overwrought sentimentality. This is the problem I had with the LOTR movies, also (yeah, you heard me. I didn’t like the LOTR movies. Feel free to bitch me out at karenology@gmail.com). Peter Jackson seems to have a propensity for taking scenes and snippets of dialogue, that, in the original works, were funny and lighthearted, and turning them OMG SAD AND DRAMATIC AND DEEP.
At the end of the Fellowship of the Ring, for instance, the scene in which Frodo is invisible and is leaving in the canoe, and Sam jumps in the water and almost drowns – that’s actually a comic moment in the book. In the movie, PJ cues the tragedy violins in the background and turns the comic moment into a weepy “oh no Sam almost just died” affair.
Exact same thing in King Kong. It also happens at the very end of this movie, when Jack Black’s character (whatshisface) looks upon the giant ape corpse and utters the line “beauty has killed the beast.” Again, in the original movie, it wasn’t meant to be a serious philosophical and emotional commentary on the state of things, and again, in PJ’s version, the way it is conveyed is over the top. Also, Jack Black has exactly one facial expression the entire movie: the “whoa, what have I done” open mouthed face. Seriously, that gets really quite old in a movie that is over three hours long.
And though I said before that I actually liked that the gorilla was more sympathetic in this movie, and that the connection between Ann and the gorilla was stronger: there is a scene in the movie in which Ann and Kong are ice-skating on a frozen pond, I kid you not. What the fuck, Peter Jackson. This is not a Tom Hanks-meets-Meg-Ryan-cute movie, this is supposed to be a movie about a giant gorilla that DESTROYS things. Now if T-Rexes had suddenly burst out of the ice at that point, the scene would have been forgivable.
Bitching aside, I liked the movie. It was much better than any of the horrible previews that preceded it will probably turn out to be, and aside from the lapses into weepy sentimentality, and the whole entire first hour before you get to see King Kong, and the random subplot with the black captain and the plucky sailor lackey that reads Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (what? how? why?!), it was well worth my money, if nothing else, to see Kong just totally destroy things. And the movie definitely delivers on this aspect.
My recommendation: see it, but go to the bathroom first, or you’ll be really miserable during the last stretch. Trust me!
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