Author: EVula
Date: 2/20/06
Rating: 6.2
Movie Rating: PG-13
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By the late date of this review, King Kong has gone through the entire Hollywood rigmarole. Hell, even the Oscar nominations are in. That doesn't it's too late to call Peter Jackson out for directing such a dawdling film, though.
In case you've been living under a rock, the Peter Jackson-helmed King Kong is a remake of an older film by the same name. The story is fairly simple: people are dicks, and so they go to Skull Island to imprison King Kong and bring him back to New York City to be a source of entertainment. He breaks loose and havoc ensues. In the end, he is killed, with the underlying theme being that humans are the real monsters (although, as you may have noticed, I prefer "dick" to "monster"). There was also another version of King Kong that was done in the 70s, but that sucked, so we'll ignore it; the less said, the better.
Now obviously, the film would be a disaster if it was simply a cookie-cutter remake of the original. And, to its credit, the original concept, plot, and characters are fleshed out very well. Too well, in some instances.
When we are introduced to our heroine, Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), it's in a montage of various Vaudvillian acts. Immediately, we see that the theatre she and her fellow actors perform in has been condemned. A random old man (who is, apparently, a father figure to Darrow), decides that this is the final straw, and abandons her to move back to Chicago. I say "random" because this occurs not more than five minutes into the movie. Anyone with any amount of sense can detect that we're supposed to feel emotion about this, but it just isn't there.
Blah blah blah, we're introduced to the characters in similarly lengthy and time-wasting ways. We see Jack Black as Carl Denham, a washed up director who is trying desperately to wring money out of his increasingly weary financial backers. Then we meet Jack Driscoll, the writer of Denham's current film, who of course eventually falls in love with Darrow. Now that we've met the three main characters (well, the main human characters), you'd think that the movie would be underway, right?
Wrong.
I'll skip summing up the rest of the plot, since it would take me about as much time as it took Peter Jackson. To make a long story longer, it takes the movie an hour and a half to get to the freaking island. So much time is wasted introducing the characters and building their life stories. Here's an idea: simply point out that it's in the middle of the friggin' Depression, and everyone in the audience will understand why everyone is so destitute. You don't have to build it up.
Worse yet, there's an utterly pointless sub-plot on the boat, involving the first mate and some random kid on the ship that he helped out one time. Why does this matter to a movie about a big ass monkey? That is an excellent question that deserves an excellent answer. Moving on.
Once they get to the island, though... the movie is badass. Kong fighting not just a single dinosaur, but several, in a ten-minute action sequence (between the film crew dealing with dinosaurs and Kong protecting Darrow) that was utterly amazing. Kong proves himself to be the master of his domain.
Kong was, obviously, done via CGI, utilizing the same techniques that Jackson used for Gollum in Lord of the Rings. The exact same technique, actually; Andy Serkis, who did the physical and vocal performance for Gollum, also portrayed King Kong (as well as the ship's cook). Most CGI used in films is, hokey at best, distracting at worst. Kong actually looks real, though. Between the subtle shifting of muscle under flowing hair and the subtle motions on his face that hint at a shred of humanity, Kong is as real as anyone else in the movie.
Once the movie moves back to NYC, though, it suffers. There is the obvious lull in action, though it isn't as offensively dull as the first hour and a half of the movie. The problem is the look. While CGI may be able to make a completely foreign jungle island look plausible, it falls flat on its face with something much more familiar, like a cityscape. It wasn't as noticable when Kong was running amuck around the city streets, but once we got the wide-angle panoramic shots (that Peter Jackson can't live without, apparently) of NYC, it became obvious that the entire world was manufactured on the computer.
Acting-wise, well... there's not much to say. Andy Serkis was great as Kong; this isn't particularly surprising, though. What did shock me was Jack Black as Carl Denham. Holy shit. He was great! He nailed the intensity that was needed to really portray the "one last shot" type of character that Denham embodied. If anything, Black's performance solidifies my complaint about the character development in the movie. One of the reasons the film seemed so redundant was that Black's character just oozed desperation and intensity; when it's that obvious, why do we need twenty-five minutes of evidence?
As I mentioned above, the Oscar nominations have already been anounced. King Kong has nabbed nods for Achievement in Art Direction, Achievement in Sound Editing, Achievement in Sound Mixing, Achievement in Visual Effects. I can't argue with any of those; visually, the movie was stunning (as long as it wasn't abused), and the sound helped bring the alien world of Skull Island to life just as much as the visual effects.
Despite how much I seemed to be slamming the movie, I don't hate it on the whole. I only hate the first hour and a half. If Peter Jackson had cut a lot of the initial character setup (it could have been done fairly easily without sacrificing quality) and the entire sub-plot on the ship, I would have no problem with the later slow-down in New York (after all, it was just the calm before the storm necessary to the climax).