KING KONG (2005)

Watts, and friend.

originally published August 26, 2007

Colour, 2005, 188 - 201 m / Directed by Peter Jackson / Starring Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann, Kyle Chandler, Andy Serkis / Universal Pictures

Synopsis:  Ape meets girl. Ape gets girl.  Ape loses girl.

Peter Jackson’s followup to his epic masterwork Lord of the Rings saga, his re-telling of the film legend of Kong had been in the works for more than a decade.  With the staggering success ofRings, Jackson had unparalleled carte blanche to film his dream project exactly as he wanted, with the cast of his choice, and actors fought tooth and nail to work with the one seeming A-budget director who could deliver jaw-dropping special effects while still allowing dramatic and powerful performances to share the screen.

Jackson’s Kong is one of the most frustrating fantasy films ever made, because there is much about it that is breath-taking and wonderful.  However, instead of presenting audiences with a re-imagining of the familiar tale, Jackson’s film is a bloated, overpopulated remake of the 1933 original.  Without fail, the contributions of Jackson and his co-writers, Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh, take away from what makes the original so enduring, padding out the action with unnecessary characters and subplots.

The story takes an eternity to get moving, as we are forced to endure a lengthy New York sequence establishing backgrounds for actress Anne Darrow (Watts) and nature filmmaker Carl Denham (Black) that were effortlessly shorthanded into the first five minutes of the original film.  For some reason, Denham has brought along a harried playwright (Brody) and we are introduced to a young orphaned crew member (Bell) who is reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.  The rough and rugged captain of The Venture haunted by his own personal demons (Kretschmann) also vies for our attentions, along with the callow leading actor Denham has brought along (played to excellent comic effect by Chandler, in one of the most criminally wasted roles in recent memory-- why couldn’t he have been the romantic lead?).  Instead of being given one core group of characters to root for, Jackson and his team have unwisely chosen to spread our sympathies among his motley crew, and we spend too much time with every quirky crew member on the boat to the island.

That crew seems to outnumber the primitive natives of the island, who nevertheless still manage to kidnap Watts and offer her to the giant ape Kong in a strangely pointless ritual.  This sequence also gives Jackson a chance to fall back on his annoying dropped-frame whip-pan inserts that popped up infrequently in his previous films.  Oddly, too, the geography of the village and the sacrificial altar are never clearly mapped for the audience, leading to some confusion as to how Black and his crew manage to follow Kong into the jungle (it seems as if they have leapt across a massive ravine to give chase).

Finally, more than an hour into the film, we meet Jackson’s Kong, a stunning CGI creation, whose movements were based on that of Serkis, who’d served a similar function as Gollum for Rings.  Paired with Watts’ sensitive performance as Anne, this is the only relationship in the whole sprawling enterprise that works, because certainly the men she’s left to choose from are hardly winners.  Brody is called upon to do a large share of heroic business, but it never makes any sense what he’s actually doing there to begin with.  Less effective is Black, whose Denham is stretched in too many directions (villain, hero, comic foil) to play any of them with success.

The film has its highlights, including the arrival at Skull Island, an exciting dinosaur chase, a fight between Kong and multiple tyrannosaurs, and all the island-based interaction with Kong and Watts.  These are almost completely outweighed by the film’s embarrassments:  the many irrelevant subplots (especially the ill-advised effort to tie Conrad’s examination of human weakness to the film’s plot), Brody watching a scene from his (apparently awful) play while thinking of Watts, and an “ice skating” sequence in Central Park.

The film’s biggest problem is that, in the end, Jackson’s Kong offers no reason for its existence.  The flawed but vastly underrated 1976 Kong justified itself by offering an environmental agenda as it recast its filmmakers an opportunistic petroleum company executive and his cronies looking for a new, untapped source of oil and finding Kong instead.  Jackson is content to retell the story in its original 1930’s milieu, adding fantastic action set-pieces and emotional complexity (warranted or not), and sacrificing pacing and streamlined storytelling.  Because the simplicity of the story has been lost, Black’s delivery of the original’s famous last line has no power, and nor can this Kongearn the truly haunting final moments of the 1976 film.