I spent one night of Christmas vacation watching Peter Jackson's King Kong with my wife and teenage son. I offer a mixed review. Some parts of the movie were nothing short of magnificent. The computer generated Kong was about as good as Kong could ever be. He looked real, and had a greater range of facial expressions than this kid who used to sit behind me in fourth grade math. Loften was his name, and he was about the same shoe size as Kong. But I digress.
The sub-magnificent parts of the movie ranged from good to bloody awful. As my college-aged daughter put it, the relationship between Ann Darrow and the Beast was not exactly healthy. The scene where Ann and Kong find one another in New York (I suppose it would be easier to find your boyfriend in a crowd if he large enough to shot-put a bread truck) is altogether ludicrous. The editing was poor in places. My wife observed that way to much time was spent on giant bugs at the bottom of a canyon. She was dead spot on. And some of the special effects were just not good enough for the overall picture.
There are some political angles worth mentioning. Some have said that the new Kong has racist overtones. That was certainly true of Willis O'Brien's original masterpiece. The 1930's Kong, in closeup shots of his face, looks like he fell out of the Jazz Singer. But I think the current Kong is largely innocent of the charges. The villagers on Skull Island are dark enough, but they don't look African. In fact, they look they escaped from Saruman's army in the second Lord of the Rings movie.
Instead, I think the most significant political point is the reinterpretation of the character of Karl Denham, played in 1933 by Robert Armstrong. In that version, Denham, the director of adventure films, is reckless way past the point of good sense, but he is heroic for just that reason. No reasonable person would want to be like him, but most of us (at least, most of us males) would have liked to have been like him when we were younger, with all the stories to tell. This is in keeping with a more Victorian view of the role of European and American adventurers. Kong was a movie that was secure in its view of civilization, progress, and exploration. One is sad, at the end, that Kong died. But one knew that his time was long over.
In the new version, Denham (Jack Black was a very good choice) is revealed as a scoundrel at the end. His passion is greed rather than courage, and he ruthlessly spends lives for footage. The movie properly lampoons era racism in the dancing black actors that portray the islanders at Kong's New York debut. But all sense of heroic adventure is tainted by suspect motives. The wise old sea captain of the 1933 ship, the Venture, is given a vague European accent, and is in the business of stealing animals from exotic places. He and his crew are one step above the level of pirates. In short, civilization is an altogether questionable business in this new Kong. I think that is rather a shame. It would have been much more daring and I think more interesting to have kept the heroic tone of the original. But Peter Jackson, who brought Middle Earth so vividly to life, didn't have the imagination for that.
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