Over winter vacation we dumped Baby Moose off on grandparents long enough to grab one movie. I really wanted to see King Kong more or less based on Peter Jackson’s track record (minus The Frighteners) and out of curiosity as to why he would remake King Kong. Not only was it just remade, albeit badly, 30 years ago, but I couldn’t figure out what more there was to say about Kong after the original, a remake, and a quasi-remake (Mighty Joe Young). I know he said he wanted to re-make the movie that inspired him to become a filmmaker, but I couldn’t quite figure that out, either. If I was a filmmaker I wouldn’t remake Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark, no matter how much better I thought the special effects could be.
So I was nicely surprised when what he did have to say with King Kong had me in tears when Kong finally plummets off of the Empire State Building. (Sorry, spoilers have a statute of limitations of less than 70 years.)
The story is familiar to most people, even if they’ve never seen the original: There is some set up to get to Skull Island (in this case they’re making a movie, as in the 1933 original), they show up on an island with a giant wall and some natives, the blonde Ann Darrow is kidnapped by the natives and offered up to Kong as a bride/sacrifice. She is rescued by her love interest. Kong gets pissed and tries to recover her only to be captured and brought to New York as an oddity. Kong gets loose, runs amok, recovers Ann, climbs the Empire State Building and gets shot off of it by planes. The end.
Except for in Jackson’s version, Kong is the hero and the sympathetic protagonist. King Kong is the embodiment of what man is before he got trapped in a society that is threatened by his masculinity and his brute power that they either have to chain it and examine it for amusement or destroy it. Though 1933 stands in for 2005, the movie I saw was an indictment of the folly of caging modern man’s natural state to the extent we have in our emasculating, politically correct society.
My only real problem with the movie is it kind of meanders along for the first hour. The tone kind of flits around and it could have easily had 20 minutes cut out of it. But once they get to the island the movie takes off like a rocket.
After Ann is grabbed by Kong and he becomes smitten with her, she escapes, but is quickly is chased by three Tyrannosaurs Rex dinosaurs. Kong answers her screams, and in one of the finest action scenes since, well, the last time Peter Jackson made a movie, Kong enters a death match with the three dinosaurs. When there is one left Ann is trapped between Kong and the last dinosaur. She makes her alliance with Kong and steps back to him and let’s his brute strength and his simian intellect protect her against the threat.
Adrian Brody eventually shows up to rescue her after the rest of the rescue party has been repelled by Kong and some of the more minor dangers of the island. He snatches her from Kong while he is sleeping. Here is an interesting statement from this movie as contrasted with the original: In the original Kong Ann’s love interest was a rough-around-the-edges first mate of the ship, here we get gangly Adrian Brody playing a writer who is in touch with his feminine side to say the least.
Once Ann is rescued from her rescuer, he gets mad that someone’s messed with his woman and flies into a rage. Kong’s love is like the rest of his attributes: fierce and unapologetic. Jack Black sets a trap for him, and knocks him out with some either.
There you have it: A moveon.org contributor, dragging off Kong to New York, the capital of Blue America, to be brought under control and profited from.
Kong is worn out. He has scars, a pot belly, and he seems tired. His time is passing him by. Probably all he wants to do is live out his last years in peace before joining the rest of his kind (if you look closely you’ll see bones of other giant apes). But suddenly he’s the captive of a New Yorker because he couldn’t resist a beautiful woman, even in his old age.
Once he is in New York, he pays the price for trying to protect himself and his woman. He runs from his captors, finds the woman he loves, and tries to get away from the mess that is New York City in 1933.
Eventually he makes it to the top of the Empire State Building, and in the final insult to the way Kong lived his life, they won’t face him man-to-ape. They use airplanes and machine guns. Maybe Kong could understand the T. Rex’s, they were his honorable competitors in the fight for survival in the wilderness and needed a meal, but he is surely confused as he takes bullet wounds as they kill him just to kill him for being what he is and nothing else.
After Kong falls Adrian Brody’s character makes it to the top, once again to save Ann. Ann cries, not only because in civilization the slightly effete writer is the manliest man she can find, but also because she knows, as we should, that not every place is New York City and not every problem can be talked out. In the real wild places of the world, unlike, say, the wilderness of Brokeback Mountain, there is a use and a need for the fierce masculinity of Kong. But Kong is dead.
(4/4 stars)
