King Kong Surprised Me
While at home last weekend, me and the Mrs. watched King Kong. I must admit, it really surprised me. Surely it must be difficult to make a movie this bad.
The movie starts off well enough — you don’t see King Kong for the first hour. While that might seem like a long time, trust me, it’s nothing compared to the next two hours you’ll spend with him.
Most offensively to us was the portrayal of the natives on Kong’s island. We see black people living as animals, while at various times the good white folk from the ship (with an exception to the black first mate who’s killed off as quickly as possible) shoot a few here and there to save their own. Gee, couldn’t we move past our disgusting stereotypes?
Then comes the ecological lala land. Where enormous apex predators and herbivores, like dinosaurs and Kong, live on an island. No one bothered to ask an ecologist about the limitations of body size on island. Okay, for this I can forgive them, even if it doesn’t win any points with me. It’s just a movie, I can accept the idea.
What I cannot accept is the next hour of utterly pointless film, with little dialogue and lots of fighting between Kong, T-Rex, and the crew. The special effects were so dominant over the actual movie that I expected Jar Jar Binks to get involved in the fray at any moment.
I understand the idea behind the movie and where the tension is supposed to come from… Kong loves the hot blond, but unfortunately the prezygotic barrier is just too big, and there can be no hope of a relationship. Still, this is not enough to sustain a three hour movie.
Even the ending stunk. Jack Black’s character, who is obsessed with exploiting Kong for a quick profit to show him off to the public, utters the worst ending line in recent memory.
It wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast.
Man, glad I waited three hours to hear that!
Just in case anybody else is like me, and catches up on the latest and greatest six months to year after it happens, don’t worry with King Kong. You can do far better.
The idea with the islanders was that they were once a great civilization but due to volcanoes and earthquakes, a lot of the island has disappeared under the ocean. And the islanders have had to retreat to just a small portion of the island, where there wasn’t enough food, etc. (Think Easter Island.) If you noticed, the wall extended pretty far into the ocean, and there were ancient buildings out in the “monster” side of the island, so that pretty well illustrated the idea of a great civilization that has fallen into ruin (physically, emotionally, and spiritually). I didn’t consider it to be racist.
All that being said though, I didn’t like the movie either. Give me the original any day. (Actually, the recent DVD release of the original is great.)
As for the last line (beauty killed the beast), I was dreading its approach. In the original it makes perfect sense and fits the movie. In this one it felt artificial and out of place.
I think Jackson was going for that off-kilter slightly-stilted realism-plus. I enjoyed the beauty of the film, though I agree parts of it dragged. I thought that epic fight sequence in the middle was one of those dragging scenes.
Fred, thanks for that note… I’m not sure that quite sunk in with me. Yes I noticed the tiny part of the island they occupied and that the wall extended out into the ocean. But I guess I didn’t think of it as a culture that had been degraded to its present state. I saw it as a terribly cliche portrayal, and judged it harshly. In large part, this comes from a lot of the reading I’ve been doing lately on islands. The history of the Tasmanian Aboriginals upon their introduction to Europeans is a terribly sad story along these lines.
Some day I’ll have to watch the original.
Yes, I have to agree that the original is much better. Jackson does keep a lot of the same or similar lines and the musical score from the original, but he also takes a lot of creative license and strays from the original story, making it much longer. To top it all off, I absolutely hated the part where the guy was eaten by giant leeches - I had nightmares about that for days!
That’s funny. The combat with giant invertebrates didn’t make me squeamish at all (though it did Amy), but the scenes where Kong is high off the ground, both on the cliff ledge and at the top of the empire state building, made me incredibly uncomfortable. I started sweating profusely and could hardly watch the screen. Bugs don’t scare me. Heights do.