KING KONG (2005)

Review by Chuck "Everyone Knows You're Square" Dixon

(Yes, this is the original version -- but the new one ain't available yet!)

The big attraction here was the scene at the bottom of the gorge.  When I was a kid, I never missed a showing of King Kong on the Early Show -- and I read anything I could on the movie. A monster magazine showed production drawings for the gorge sequence that was never included in the movie. They showed sailors battling giant land crabs and other horrible critters. That drawing was the source of many ghoulish hours of imagining what that sequence must have been like. You know what’s it like when you’re a kid, you’ll explore dark, nightmarish ideas the way your tongue explores a loose tooth.

So, after many more years than I care to think about, that scene is finally realized on film and, obviously, me and Peter Jackson could have partied back in the day. The moments in the gorge are among the creepiest, disturbing and just plain icky I’ve ever seen in a movie. The eight year old in me was in rapture.

And the feel of that scene carries over in much of the rest of the movie. He gets across a primitive, primal sense of terror. This is one of the few flicks I’ve ever sent that capture that real sense of dread, that taps into the fight or flight adrenal impulse. Ever been seconds from being killed by a wild critter much bigger than you? Been there. And I’m here to tell you that this movie taps into the deep instinctual “if I don’t get the hell out of here I am going to be eaten” feelings that any creature feels at the mercy of a predator.

Beyond scaring the hell out of the child in me in the movie is another example of Jackson’s “getting” classic cinema. You have your homages and pastiches and flat-out rip-offs. Jackson proves here he could have run with Hitchcock or Hawks or Lang or Ford or the rest.

Just the idea of creating a montage of new footage to portray the Great Depression rather than using stock footage is so old it’s new again. His deft hand creates footage that is absolutely convincing and touching and more immediate than showing us scratchy old vintage footage that would only serve to remind us we’re watching a movie.

The casting is dead on. Anyone who’s watched enough Jack Black knows he had this performance in him. He’s earnest as hell and manages to be both over the top and subtle at the same time. He’s at the core of the movie and does a fine portrayal of a great character. 

Naomi Watts is astonishingly beautiful and pulls off her role with aplomb. This had to be a tough one and she makes her scenes her own. 

Adrian Brody is perfectly cast as a Lost Generation idealist. 

Colin Hanks shows more depth than his dad as the movie’s conscience and silent witness. 

The biggest kick for me was seeing Kyle Chandler in a great role. This guy looks SO period and has long deserved a big shot like this. And if they don’t make lithos of those movie posters from his cabin I want to know WHY! Chandler also delivers the movie’s best line at the end of his rushed soliloquy on heroes, “I’m just a good looking guy with a gun who’s run out of options.” I was very pleased when his character redeemed himself.

Enjoyed very much the portrayal of the tribe hugging the shore of that miserable island. Someone did their homework in establishing it as a matriarchal society. It all fell into line with everything I’ve ever read about these remote Neolithic tribes. You’ll live longer if you don’t run across them.

The island itself was amazingly re-imagined. Jackson restores the sense of wonder by revealing that there are more structures like the wall in the interior of the island. Who built them and why? Were the giant apes kept as pets? Protectors? Who were these people who kept the jungle at bay around their massive city and co-existed with giant predators?
We’re also presented with evidence that Kong is the last of his kind and that there was once race of these big apes who ruled the island from their mountain fortress, perhaps instinctively still guarding the temples of their masters?  Not much more I can say about Kong himself. An astounding effects creation.

The action set pieces were breath-taking. I particularly loved the dinosaur stampede. I’m dying to know what the inspiration for these scene was. The hyper-violent critter stampede from Tarzan at the Earth’s Core? Or, one of my favorites, an extended scene from an old KONA comic drawn by Sam Glanzman in which hundreds of dinos charge down a narrow valley and trample everything in their path. As a kid I spent many an afternoon recreating this scene with plastic dinosaurs on the living room rug.

And as wild as Skull Island is, 1930s New York City is just as much of a treat. Let’s hope we wee this virtual back lot used in more movies. Imagine a Shadow flick with these backdrops. Or maybe someone will finally make Merion Coopers’ War Eagle, the originally intended follow-up to King Kong.

Which brings us back to Jackson’s treatment of the original 1933 version. This is obviously HIS vision of a cherished film. But he does nothing to diminish the original in his re-telling. The sturdy plot is entirely unchanged from Cooper’s movie but Jackson fleshes out the characters in ways that don’t violate their original portrayals. He adds depth and nuance and adds a few characters so the crew of the Venture don’t just seem like straw men. The only changes Jackson makes are improvements on the original and in line with how they might have filmed it then had they the resources to do so.

All in all a tremendous achievement and worth the wait. I’ll certainly be seeing it again before its run is over.

©2005 by Chuck Dixon. All Rights Reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced without permission.

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