King Kong (2005)
Directed by Peter Jackson
In 1933 New York, an overly ambitious movie producer coerces his cast and hired ship crew to travel to mysterious Skull Island, where they encounter Kong, a giant ape who is immediately smitten with the leading lady.
25 connections found
View:
25 films that influenced King Kong
What critics say influenced King Kong
And, too, it’s a corker of an action/monster movie: part RKO serial (natch); part square-jawed, testosterone infused manly romp; and part classic journey into the unknown that recalls and references, surprisingly and splendidly, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – "Mistah Kong – he dead."
The dialogue is the weakest element and secondary characters, such the young crewman (Jamie Bell) who lifts a copy of "Heart of Darkness" from the New York Public Library, don't add much.
While at sea we meet the grizzled captain of the ship (Thomas Kretschmann); Hayes (Evan Parke), the African-American first mate; Jimmy (Jaime Bell), a castaway who is reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness; and Bruce Baxter (Kyle Chandler), the dashing and egocentric leading man.
New Zealander Peter Jackson of the Lord of the Rings trilogy fame, obviously thinks otherwise and forges ahead with this $200 million budgeted splashy eye-popping special effects extravaganza that mixes schlock and art (shamelessly alluding many times to Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," when the two sea stories couldn't be farther apart), and a hokey love story between a young woman so desperate for protection in the cruel world that she falls for a 50-foot gorilla.
Young Jimmy (Jamie Bell) is reading Joseph Conrad’s journey-into-madness classic “Heart of Darkness” and discusses it with father figure Hayes (Evan Parke) as they unwittingly enter into their own horrific adventure.
The dinos are right up to the "Jurassic Park" level.
After a rather slow build-up - it takes almost an hour until we make it to Skull Island - "King Kong" becomes "Jurassic Park" on steroids.
Jackson balances these tender moments with slam-bang action sequences the likes of which haven't been seen since Jurassic Park or Titanic -- and surpasses them.
To try to make up, he crams the island with a Macy's Parade of CGI behemoths, Jurassic Park rejects all, before pausing long enough so the ooga-booga dark-skinned natives can snatch the white woman.
Of course, in all previous versions of Kong, Skull Island has been a haven for prehistoric fauna, but who knew that Jackson would take that as his cue to make a movie that, for most of its second hour, feels like a cross between Jurassic Park and that ersatz insect-world docudrama, The Hellstrom Chronicle?
They come across as something less than believable — more like escapees from Jurassic Park than anything to do with King Kong — and the effects in the frankly preposterous stampede are wanting.
Black single-handedly manipulates the film’s underlying comic tone and alleviates some of its excessive violence with a characterization that spins in a parallel orbit with Howard Hughes as filmmaker around the same time that Hughes made "Hell’s Angels."
If a scene of the duo 'skating' as Kong delights in sliding on ice had me suppressing the urge to hum the 'Skating in Central Park' theme from "Love Story," it still possessed its own magic, Kong seeming somehow less anthropomorphized than those marching penguins.
Advertisement
In this version, Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), Ann’s love interest, is a suave New York screenwriter shanghaied by Denham and a crew of wild-animal smugglers in scenes somewhat reminiscent of James Cameron’s ”Titanic.”
In much the same way that James Cameron insisted on exact authenticity for Titanic to use as a backdrop for his fictional story, Peter Jackson re-creates life in 1933 to show what lengths his characters will go to secure their fame and fortune.
Think Titanic with a hirsute and rather large leading man instead of boyish Leonardo DiCaprio, dinosaurs and bugs instead of icebergs and water.
Jack, disgusted when his alter ego, the cowardly movie star Bruce Baxter (Kyle Chandler, "Mulholland Falls"), is presented as Kong's defeater, rushes to lure the ape away from midtown, while Ann, who has refused to take part in Kong's exploitation, hears the pandemonium outside and finds the bruised beast, offering him comfort.
There are a few moments of quiet grace (Kong and Ann’s skate across a frozen pond — an homage to Portrait of Jennie?) that work very well.
The movie makes the same kind of shift involving a giant gorilla that Spielberg's " Close Encounters of the Third Kind " (1977) did when he replaced 1950s attacks on alien visitors with a very 1970s attempt to communicate with them (by 2005, Spielberg was back to attacking them, in " War of the Worlds ").
Advertisement
Jackson is potentially the next Spielberg, and King Kong is his Raiders, E.T. and Jurassic Park rolled into one.
Action-adventure lovers have the dino-rampage, featuring raptors chasing down a pack of brontosaurs; the triple T-Rex smackdown (a tour de force that lasts about 10 minutes); an insect attack that will make bug-phobes squirm (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is tame by comparison); Kong's attempts to reclaim his stolen bride; and the final Empire State Building battle.