King Kong (2005) is directed by
acclaimed Lord of the Rings director
Peter Jackson. After the wild success he had adventuring in Middle Earth,
Jackson made this passion-project remake of the 1933 film King Kong. It follows essentially the same story, a filmmaker and
his crew recruit a beautiful woman and travel to a mysterious island where they
encounter a bunch of frightening creatures including one giant ape that they
bring back to New York where havoc ensues. The film stars Naomi Watts, Jack
Black, Adrein Brody, and frequent Jackson-collaborator Andy Serkis.
Given
Jackson’s past with making B-horror movies, it isn’t surprising that he’d have
such passion and care for a classic creature feature like King Kong. This film covers the content of the original King Kong in its near entirety and
vastly expands upon it, stretching an hour and forty-five-minute film into a three-hour
epic. What I think this does most effectively is faithfully retell the story of
the original while offering meaningful updates to that piece that make it much
more watchable as a modern audience member. The film gets a little too
indulgent to a fault, however, and the film drags a lot and has many moments of
extreme cheese.
As mentioned
above I think this film succeeds in being an effective and enthralling
retelling of a classic story. By capturing the original beat for beat, this
film retains the magic of that story and the elements that really work. It
captures you from the beginning and you can readily follow along step by step
of the decisions that the different individuals come to make throughout. It
also causes you to care about Kong when we roll through the ending and with
what happens to him. It gives it a certain effectiveness and power that an
unfaithful telling would not be able to achieve.
On
top of its strong faithfulness, Peter Jackson’s King Kong succeeds because it successfully updates all of the
problems from the original film. The acting has much more nuance, the effects
and situations are more believable, and you feel the impact of what is going on
on screen. That’s an extremely effective thing to have in your film. Jackson
really knows how to make some truly nightmare-ish scenarios happen and one
involving hyper-large insects still makes my skin crawl.
I
also found the motion capture work and the visualization of King Kong to be
extremely effective. Although it comes nowhere close to what Serkis and performance
capture teams have accomplished with his later works in the Planet of the Apes
films, King Kong is still fairly
advanced and the use of performance captured enabled greater emotion and
connection to Kong than any attempt previous. In addition to Serkis, the work
Black and Watts do in the film is really solid and adds a certain resonance
that the disjointed performances in the original lacked.
Jackson’s
King Kong isn’t all that and a bag of
chips though. The film suffers from gargantuan pacing issues and has an unusual
(and off-putting) lack of realism and cheese for a film in this day in age. By
extending what was a short and tight film to something that is almost double in
length, Jackson had to add several elements but he also saw fit to draw out
many others. The first hour of this film, for example, is all set up material
that could have easily been covered in half the time or less and ends up
dragging such that I was near catatonic by the time we finally got to the main
events of the story. This really didn’t work and made the film feel really
ineffectively slow.
The
film also suffers from being overly faithful to the original story to the point
that it retains a level of cheese and lack of realism that makes the film feel
divorced from a recognizable reality. There
are some extremely over the top and on the nose lines (particularly the one
that closes the film) to the point that I lost a degree of care for what was
going on in the film. It also evolves several moments of zaniness that felt out
of line with some of the terrors shown elsewhere. Finally, a number of the
visuals in this film haven’t held up well. Kong himself looks ok, and the large
insects looked undoubtedly horrifying, but the environments and the dinosaurs really
haven’t aged well making the film look more like a computer animated film than
something set in the real world.
Overall,
I think Jackson’s King Kong is a fair
effort at this classic story and I think that it works as an effective-enough
modern retelling to merit its place in cinematic history. It updates in all the
ways it needs to by adding nuance and getting you invested in what is going on,
but it does so at the expense of effective pacing and failing to update as
effectively as it ought to in certain areas.
Ryan’s
Score: 6/10
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