Late on Christmas day, several of our family members ventured out to see King Kong, one of the “big” movies of the season. We were disappointed to be told that it was sold out. I had to wait three weeks to see it but needn’t have been annoyed; the new remade King Kong is just not that good. Its strengths are outweighed by its weaknesses, but before we examine both of those, let me give the briefest of plot summaries: A struggling movie director, a would-be actress, and a well-known playwright find themselves on a tramp steamer headed for (apparently) the Far East. The obsessed director is on a quest to find an exotic subject for a movie that will resurrect his career. The steamer encounters a great storm and is blown to an “undiscovered” island which at first appears uninhabited. Finding hundreds of skeletons, the movie folks and the crew think they’ve stumbled on a deserted anthropological gold mine, but they soon learn that there are in fact people living there, and the skeletons represent sacrifices to – you guessed it – the mighty (but herbivorous) King Kong. A good deal of the movie is taken up with their encounters with Kong and every other computer-generated creature imaginable. Needless to say, the director’s obsession with filming everything he can see results in Kong’s capture and his being taken to Manhattan and his major moment atop the Empire State Building.
STRENGTHS:
Theme: The beauty-and-the-beast theme works well; we come to sympathize with the giant gorilla. More significantly, the picture makes a decent criticism of greed and exploitation.
Acting: Naomi Watts and Adrien Brody do creditable jobs of portraying the “beauty” (the analogue of Fay Wray in the original film) and the playwright she loves. The other actors also do reasonably well.
Locales: The film looks beautiful — even if most of the locales are computer-generated.
WEAKNESSES:
Length: At three hours or so, the picture is much too long.
Special Effects: They’re way, way overdone. In one seemingly interminable segment, Kong, the movie people, and the ship’s crew fight every dinosaur and other slimy creature imaginable. It soon becomes ludicrous.
Language: There are several misuses of the Lord’s name.
Purpose: The original (1933) King Kong is considered a classic. There was a dressy but feeble remake in 1976 starring Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange. Director Peter Jackson did a wonderful job with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but he has fallen victim to the current mania for remaking movies that don’t need to be remade. In the future he might be well advised to tackle things that haven’t been done before.
Film Rating: PG-13
My Rating: 2 ¼ stars.
Bottom Line: See it if you must, but with March Madness approaching, you’d be much better off ordering or buying the 1933 Golden Oldie.
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