KING KONG
Director: Peter Jackson
Starring: Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrien Brody, Andy Serkis, Colin Hanks, Kyle Chandler, Thomas Kretschmann
Genre: Action Adventure
2005
Reviewed by Vance Aandahl
Watson Scale rating (0 being worst and 6 being perfect): 2
In a famous scene from the original KING KONG made by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack in 1933, the giant ape battles a tyrannosaur while Ann Darrow (played by Fay Wray) watches in breathless horror from a tree. At first Kong seems to be getting the worst of it. The larger, heavier tyrannosaur threatens to pin him down and rip him to shreds with its teeth. But Kong springs free and squares off against the tyrannosaur like a Marquis of Queensberry boxer, peppering the big reptile with a barrage of jabs and uppercuts. He uses wrestling moves too. Eventually he succeeds in leaping onto the tyrannosaur’s back, prying its mouth open, and ripping its lower jaw off its hinges. This indignity is too much for the mighty saurian, and it sinks into death’s embrace.
When modern audiences see the original KING KONG, they react to this scene with raucous guffaws of derision. Usually someone will add to the merriment by shouting out, “Use your left, Kong! Set him up for the right hook!” Because our sense of awe and wonder has been surfeited by the miracle of computer-generated imagery, we 21st-century moviegoers cannot easily imagine the effect Kong’s fight with the tyrannosaur must have had on the opening-night audience in 1933. Were they genuinely terrified and thrilled by what they saw? Was the fearful hush in the theater broken only by a few squeals of nervous laughter when Kong started throwing punches? As gouts of blood trickled and gushed from the corner of the tyrannosaur’s mouth, did the audience stare at the screen in silent, bug-eyed amazement? They must have.
To create the same intensity of awe and wonder for contemporary audiences, Peter Jackson knew he’d have to up the ante. His remake of KING KONG closely follows the original script. The story is still set during the Great Depression. The main characters are still a brash and ethically challenged young filmmaker named Carl Denham (Jack Black) and a wan, penniless beauty named Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) who’s rescued by Denham when she steals an apple from a fruit stand. And the plot is still the same, with the opening scenes in New York City, a gradual buildup of suspense during the long ocean journey, non-stop action on Skull Island, and then a quick jump back to the Big Apple for Kong’s escape and final battle at the top of the Empire State Building. Jackson has recreated all of the original movie’s memorable moments with a vengeance. The feeling one gets is that he wanted not so much to emulate the original as to outdo it, to show it up, to overblow it, to prove he could take each of those famous moments and make it longer, grander, and more elaborate.
Thus it came to pass that Peter Jackson’s giant ape is attacked by three tyrannosaurs, not just one. Why be chintzy? The suddenness of their onslaught takes Kong by surprise while he’s carrying Ann through the jungle. There’s no time to deposit her in a tree, so Kong must carry her during the fight and thus has only one arm free with which to defend himself. He moves with the grace and ease of a martial arts expert, flipping Ann from one hand to the other as he pivots and leaps over the snapping jaws of his adversaries, delivering blows with first one fist, then the other. (Aficionados of Japanese cinema will be reminded of the Lone Wolf and Cub flicks, in which a psychotic samurai named Ogami Itto slices and dices dozens of enemy swordsmen while carrying his infant son gently cradled in one arm.)
One of the tyrannosaurs pins Kong down and chews on his arm. Kong rips free and pounds on the tyrannosaurs. The battle rages on and on at breakneck speed. Eventually Kong, Ann, and two of the tyrannosaurs tumble over the edge of a cliff and plunge into a deep chasm. Do they break their backs on the rocks far below? No, they are caught and saved by a tangled net of vines that crisscrosses the chasm. (There’s a lot of body weight involved, but that doesn’t mean this scene is implausible. Skull Island has giant apes, giant reptiles, giant insects, and giant bats, so it’s only logical that the vines would be capable of handling giant loads.) During the fall, Ann has been separated from Kong. Now she dangles from the lowest vine, clinging to it with both hands, struggling to hold on. Suspended in awkward positions in mid-air, their limbs trapped in the knotted webbing of the vines, the tyrannosaurs thrash wildly about, slashing their teeth at Ann whenever they swing close to her. Kong clambers downward to the rescue, throwing punches at the tyrannosaurs and reaching out to grab Ann before she loses her grip and plummets into the abyss.
Peter Jackson is a master of the spectacular. His version of Kong’s fight is longer than the original, grander, and more elaborate. Also sillier. And much more preposterous.
Figuring out what to do about the natives of Skull Island must have tested Jackson’s ingenuity severely. The Hollywood extras who played the natives in the original KING KONG earned their pay. They had to wear grass skirts, coconut-shell brassieres, and gorilla-skin capes. Talk about cheesy costumes! They had to beat on drums, engage in a lot of oogah-boogah chanting, and dance rhythmically in circles while tossing their heads up and down. They had to shake their spears at Kong like a bunch of morons. And then of course they had to pretend to be totally transfixed and enchanted by the sight of Ann Darrow’s golden tresses. One look at the history of lynching and you can see why this blonde-goddess bullshit cuts to the bone.
To deal with such a touchy subject, the cunning Jackson formulated a three-pronged strategy.
First, distance yourself from the original. Make sure your natives are completely different from the 1933 natives. To do this, Jackson recruited a team of genuine Melanesians and gave them all horror-movie makeovers. Instead of wearing bushy grass skirts, these Skull Islanders decorate their gaunt, skeletal, nearly naked bodies with dark nets of something thready and icky-looking. Their bluish-black skin has a moist, ash-gray pallor, as though the blood had been drained from their veins. They roll their eyes back and speak in tongues, muttering insanely. Their teeth are as rotten and deformed as the teeth of the Orcs in Jackson’s Ring Trilogy. All in all, they look like extras from DAWN OF THE DEAD who accidentally wandered onto the wrong soundstage.
Second, show everybody you know the depiction of the natives in the original KING KONG is phony, unrealistic, and racially offensive. To do this, Jackson resurrects the original natives in the form of a ridiculously flamboyant professional dance troupe. After the expedition has returned to New York City, Carl Denham displays Kong in chains on the Broadway stage. Everything about the show is bogus except Kong himself. When Denham relates the story of Kong’s capture and Ann’s rescue, he gives credit to the wrong person, an egomaniacal Hollywood matinee idol named Bruce Baxter (Kyle Chandler). When Denham introduces Ann to the audience, he uses a ditzy stand-in because the real Ann has refused to be part of the show. The dancers strut and shimmy across the stage in their coconut-shell bras and gorilla-skin capes, hamming it up and camping it up. “I would never, never, never seriously indulge in the racial stereotyping of the 1930’s,” Jackson seems to be saying. “Instead, my intention is to satirize it by showing how ludicrous it is.”
Third, demonstrate your deep and abiding respect for people of color. To do this, Jackson added a new character to the crew of the S.S. Venture. A black first mate named Hayes (Evan Parke) is the living embodiment of dignity, intelligence, wisdom, and moral courage. Hayes mentors Jimmy (Jamie Bell), the youngest member of the crew. To improve his mind during the ocean journey, Jimmy has been reading “Heart of Darkness.” Hayes explicates the nuances of Conrad’s philosophy for the lad, then risks his life repeatedly protecting Jimmy and various other members of the crew from their own foolhardiness on Skull Island. Needless to say, the noble Hayes eventually sacrifices himself to save the others. Jackson had the best of intentions, I suppose, but this effort to counterbalance the evil, demented natives and the cornball dancers with a shiningly perfect Afro-American hero seems altogether too contrived, too strained, and too self-conscious.
Having bent over backwards to prove he’s not a racist, Jackson was hit with that nasty accusation anyway. The Washington Post’s Stephen Hunter asserts that the new KING KONG “remains a parable of exploitation, cultural self-importance, the arrogance of the West, all issues that were obvious in the original but unexamined; they remain unexamined here, if more vivid.” And Slate.com reviewer David Edelstein emphasizes the “implicit racism of KING KONG – the implication that Kong stands for the black man brought in chains from a dark island (full of murderous primitive pagans) and with a penchant for skinny white blondes.” Fortunately for Jackson, most of the critics and millions of moviegoers appear oblivious to Edelstein’s symbolic reading of Kong, preferring to see the big gorilla as a misunderstood romantic hero whose love for Ann Darrow is tragically doomed because he’s trapped inside the wrong kind of body to be her boyfriend. This is quite a change from the original movie.
In the 1930’s, a badly misinformed American public was convinced that gorillas are the most murderous beasts in the whole animal kingdom, always looking for a human being to dismember. In the Cooper and Schoedsack KING KONG, Kong leers wickedly at Ann, his eyes burning with evil. Ann shrinks away from Kong, screaming in terror. This is true of the scenes on Skull Island, and it’s also true of the scenes in New York. At the very end, when the airplanes are chewing Kong up with machine-gun fire, he sets Ann down on a ledge before falling to his death. This gesture suggests that underneath all that glowering malevolence, all that rage and violence and willful destruction, Kong has tender feelings for Ann and wants to make sure she doesn’t die when he does. It’s just a hint, nothing conclusive. All we know for sure is that his fascination with her beauty has led to his downfall.
Flash forward to 2005. Now the American public is convinced that gorillas are the gentlest and most wonderful of all God’s creatures. In Peter Jackson’s KING KONG we can see immediately that Kong is head over heels in love with Ann, the big dummy. Soon enough she falls in love with him too. They spend a lot of time gazing into each other’s eyes. Unlike the original Kong with his lecherous, fiery orbs, this Kong has eyes that are big and brown and soulful, brimming over with puppy love for Ann. When they reach his mountaintop lookout, the giant ape and the skinny blonde sit together in contented silence, gazing out at the scenic panorama of Skull Island’s jungles and forests. To entertain him, she juggles, turns cartwheels, and does an Egyptian shimmy dance. He squirms and rocks back and forth and slaps the ground to show his delight. Later, after busting his chains in New York City, he doesn’t have to hunt her down and recapture her. Instead, she comes willingly to him. The camera assumes Kong’s viewpoint, letting us see her as he does. She emerges into his field of vision from what appears to be a tunnel of light, her exquisite form dazzling and celestial as she walks slowly and serenely toward him. To fulfill the romantic mood created by this camera shot, the dashing Kong takes Ann ice-skating by moonlight in Central Park. I kid you not. Clearly, the problem with KING KONG isn’t racism. The problem is fatuity.
