King Kong (2005)

In the movies, as in real life, first impressions are hugely important. King Kong does not make a good first impression. I mean Peter Jackson's new giant ape movie King Kong, of course, not the title monkey himself. Although the ape King Kong doesn't make a terribly great first impression either, what with his intense, repulsive simian odor, propensity towards chest-thumping and primal, destructive temper.

Jackson's film takes a little more than double the amount of time of the 1933 original to tell what amounts to the exact same story. In an interview earlier this year, a reporter asked him why he thought that might be, and he didn't have a good answer...That much is obvious from seeing the film. His version doesn't really add a single thing that wasn't in the original version. He just pads the narrative with extra exposition, adds in subplots and secondary characters that don't really go anywhere and draws out sequences to twice their natural length. Counter-intuitively, almost all of Jackson's additions come in the film's front half, before the real action-adventure story can even begin.

What Jackson has done makes very little sense to me - he has taken a film that was a model of efficiency, and turned it into a self-important, navel-gazing snoozefest...

For the first 90 minutes. After that, it rocks.



Once Kong takes over - once Jackson gets over himself and begins to actually tell a story - the movie rights itself. Hidden beneath that first hour and a half, which features the clunkiest filmmaking of Jackson's filmography to date, are some really fantastic effects and sequences of sustained power. So much of the second and third act of King Kong is so good, it almost made me want to let bygones be bygones and just overlook entirely how bad that beginning really was. Almost.

Jackson hasn't changed much structurally from Marion C. Cooper's original 1933 film. Adventurous, fast-talking filmmaker Carl Denham (Jack Black) leads a small crew, including beautiful starlet Anne Darrow (Naomi Watts) and screenwriter Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody, whose character was changed from a first mate in the original film) on a mysterious sea voyage to shoot his next picture. Once they arrive at the previously-unexplored Skull Island, they discover it is home to some irritable natives, a shitload of ferocious dinosaurs and one 25-foot surly ape apparently named Kong.

Cooper races through this material in the 1933 movie. He realizes that the set-up is just a way of getting his characters to the island, and that the real attraction are the special effects and the adventure sequences. Merian Cooper had a clear vision of his task as a director - to entertain, dazzle, excite and enthrall audiences. Jackson seems to have a higher purpose in mind, though I'll be damned if I could tell you what exactly he's trying to capture.

He lingers on the (admittedly impressive) period Manhattan sets. He spends time establishing Ann's failed career as a vaudevillian, even giving her a mentor character who will never be seen again. He piles on a number of inconsequential roadblocks to Denham's production, including budgetary problems, scheduling issues and loud conflict with the heads of the studio. He introduces a wealth of uninteresting, unimportant side characters, including the ship's skipper Hayes (Evan Parke), a former stowaway who is Hayes' charge (Jamie Bell) and the ship's cook (Andy Serkis, who posed for the motion capture for the Kong character as well as Gollum in Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies).

None of these changes enhances the movie in any real way. They don't make the action more gripping, they don't raise the stakes on the events of the film, they don't help contemporize the situations or make them more culturally relevant, and it doesn't make the film seem larger or more epic in scope. All it does is drag down the pace of the film to a stand-still, and push the running time to 3 hours and 7 minutes, far too long for the kind of fleet adventure film into which King Kong eventually transforms.

What could have happened? Even though I had my problems with Return of the King, there wasn't anything approaching the overdirection evident in this film. The first hour in particular is filled with unneccessary slow motion, cheesy references to the original movie (including an offensive Asian caricature named Choy who should have been cut from the story) and camera tricks designed only to call attention to themselves. There is about three times as much slo-mo in this film as any movie could ever need. One scene, in which Adrien Brody types out the phrase "Skull Island" is super-super-super-slo-mo, plays as self-parody and elicited a hearty laugh from the sold-out crowd in Century City tonight.

Possibly because of his devotion to the 1933 version, Jackson seems intent on elevating this material into a classic, a masterpiece for all time. But really, it's a giant ape movie. Cooper's film had no pretentions about the story it was trying to tell. It became a classic because of the craft applied in telling its simple story, not because of the immense sense of importance and high-minded artistry with which Cooper approached the story of a monkey loose in the big city. It's an adventure story, not a pretentious end-of-the-year awards grab. And trying to squeeze a thought-provoking, sweeping, romantic period epic out of an adventure story probably just isn't that good of an idea.

Mercifully, once the crew has arrived on Skull Island, and Ann has been kidnapped by the surprisingly gentle beast of the film's title, Jackson finds his footing and the movie comes alive. The film's second half flies by in a flurry of awe-inspiring action sequences, emotional payoffs and massive set pieces.

Much of the credit goes to the Kong creature itself, another wonder of the digital age. I've heard it said that this film's Kong is the most fully-realized CG animated character yet. I'd still give the award to Gollum from the Lord of the Rings films, a creature composed entirely of pixels and yet capable of giving a more lifelike, nuanced and subtle performance than 90% of Young Hollywood. But Kong is certainly the most technically impressive CG effect to date, particularly in terms of integrating the animation with actual filmed footage.

Kong's ability to interact with his environment is totally seamless. In one scene borrowed directly from the classic film, Kong shakes a log holding many humans, hanging on for dear life, over a large ravine. In the original, Kong picks up the log for a moment, and in those shots the log itself is pretty clearly animated. It's still an impressive effect, don't get me wrong. I'm just using it to highlight how far technology has come since 1933. In this version, CG Kong picks up a real log, a log containing Andy Serkis and Adrien Brody and Jack Black, and gives it a good shake, right there, in clear daylight, spilling men down into vines and tree branches, and on to the craggy rock surface below. Amazing.

In a good year for action sequences, a year that has included Batman Begins and Revenge of the Sith and War of the Worlds, King Kong has perhaps the biggest and best thrill ride moment yet. Denham and Co. get caught up in a brontosaurus stampede, evading a team of kill-crazy raptors, which eventually morphs into what I believe is the first Massive Dinosaur Dog Pile in movie history. This sequence has that same swagger and confidence as the T-Rex scene in Jurassic Park or Cameron's Harrier Jet sequence from True Lies. One of those times when a director clearly knows he has knocked one clear out of the park, and takes an extra moment to revel in his success.



Jackson wisely gives Kong a kind of world-weariness, a fatigue right from the start, that just makes his fast downfall that much more sympathetic. His body and face are scarred from years of battling dinosaurs on Skull Island, he visably winces in pain every time he's hit by stray gunfire (which is pretty often once he starts demolishing wide swatches of 42nd Street) and his tendency to lash out in frustration evidences a lifetime spent in anguished solitude. Just as he was back in the Cooper picture, the monkey is really the star of this movie, and when he's on screen it's impossible to take your eyes off of him.

After all its problems, King Kong still manages to build to a wrenching, emotional conclusion. I wouldn't have thought it possible to win me back after the dismal first hour of this film, but by the time Kong has run amock in the Big Apple, and prepares to meet his end alongside his lady love at the Empire State, it's hard not to feel for the big guy. Jerked around by an entertainment industry type, manipulated by a woman, chronically misunderstood by everyone he meets, left for dead on the streets on Manhattan...We've all been there, right?

One pitch-perfect scene near the end, featuring Kong and Ann frolicking on a frozen-over pond in Central Park, earns crucial last-second points. It builds slowly, it's subtle, it's beautifully shot, the Naomi Watts performance is impressive, James Newton Howard's score hits at just the right moment and it really helps end the movie with a somber, reverent kind of melancholy.

In fact, the only way I could have enjoyed the end of the film more is if it had come about 45 minutes earlier in the evening. 3 hours is just way too long for this story, and it begins to capsize under its own weight. The end has poignancy, but it still does kind of lack immediacy because of the lengthy running time. The fact that Peter Jackson has such outsized ambitions is great, but he needs to find a better way to match the kind of movie he wants to make up with the material he's actually adapting.