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King Kong

Film // Tom // 4th January 2006

If you’ve ever been close enough to smell an adult male gorilla then you will know that the popular clichés about their BO are not particularly exaggerated; Imagine Bernard Manning on a diet of bananas, and you're getting close. The musk also engenders a basic feeling of deep unease, probably once a useful human survival trait, although less so in Warwickshire these days. This - and the awkward size difference - should make the classic tale of the love affair between woman and giant ape seem pretty laughable - but the 1933 original has long been hailed as a cinematic classic, spawning a widely derided remake in 1976, but for 2005 a modern version from the current celluloid titan Peter Jackson.

PJ has followed up his critically canonised Lord of the Rings trilogy with another real classic. The story is pretty familiar to most, and is actually pretty faithful; an ambitious film director sets off for a legendary lost isle, with a film crew and cast. They find an island populated by cannibals, dinosaurs, and a giant gorilla which they capture and bring back to New York. The real heart of the film centres on the relationship between the starlet and the ape, a mixture of "Beauty and the Beast" and Stockholm Syndrome, complicated by her nascent love affair with the film’s writer (played with restraint by Adrien Brody).

The flavour of depression-era New York is skilfully produced by a series of evocative opening scenes, showing the newly-built skyscrapers rising above the squalor and desperation of the population below. We are quickly introduced to the main protagonists – mostly showing Jack Black’s excellent portrayal of the single-minded producer, Carl Denholm, whose dogged persistence, whilst starting out as a comic aspect of his character, becomes the object of our contempt by the end of the film.

It is King Kong’s action scenes that really stand out however, and these raise the bar in the same way as the Spider-Man films, and Jackson’s own LOTR trilogy have achieved over the past few years. We duck and weave in sympathy with our heroic if foul-smelling hero as he battles T-Rex’s, giant vampire bats, the crew of the Venture, and more T-Rex’s. In the later scenes, KK’s largely undisputed mastery of his jungle foes makes his largely anti-climatic defeat by the National Guard seem more poignant.

The film is not perfect – Jackson seems to have a yen for making each film longer than the last. If, like me your bladder recoils in dismay at films over 2 hours, then you may as well resign yourself to the fact that you’ll be visiting the toilet at some stage – and in honesty, you can choose from quite a number of scenes during the middle section of the scene to miss, with little real consequence to the overall film.

My partner Amy enjoyed the film – but also picked up on the other major flaw – the film tends to skate across the thin ice of sentimentality, with more then one ominous cracking sound as a result. The scene in Central Park (can you see what I did there!) is definitely the worst example of this, but the ending of the film is also pretty protracted (thankfully still a long way off AI, however..)

Kong: Long, Smelly

All in all, KK represents a real triumph, especially when you consider our current expectations of Peter Jackson, as well as the fact that the story holds little surprises for much of the audience. Jackson seems to have mastered the art of delivering the “thinking man’s blockbuster”, and for the time being retains the safest pair for making (or remaking) cinematic classics. I wonder if he fancies having a go at The Phantom Menace….

Kong Links....

The shocking 1976 version

Jessica Lange was a bit special though...

The even more shocking 1986 sequel to the shite 1976 version

Honestly this is true, apparently Kong survived the fall and ends up with a robot heart or something.