King Kong
Deluxe Extended Version
The DVD release of the ultimate version of Peter Jackson’s 2005 version King Kong
Synopsis
It’s the great depression and New York city is a place of desperate people. One of these people is Carl Denhan, nature movie producer. Denham has a plan to go to an uncharted island, but his backers have decided to pull out and close his production down. Carl takes desperate measures to escape New York and make his way to the legendary island.
His ship, The Venture is crewed by a seedy group of animal trapper/traders and onboard Carl has collected Ann Darrow, a spunky young, thoroughly modern missy and would-be actress, and Jack Driscoll, serious theatre playwright and reluctant writer of Carl’s screenplay.
They arrive at the island and are nearly destroyed by the savage ocean and the even more savage natives. They escape, but the natives capture Ann and sacrifice her to their god, Kong, a gigantic gorilla.
Denham (who is seeking spectacular footage) and Driscoll (who has fallen in love with Ann) lead a party into the island’s interior to rescue Ann.
The party are systematically wiped out by dinosaurs, lake monsters, scorpions, giant insects and Kong himself.
Ann realizes the fate of the other “sacrifices†to Kong and does her spunky young, thoroughly modern missy best to win King over, which she does through pratfalls. Kong may be king of the island, but to keep her safe, he must also fight a trio of Tyranosaurs and other nasties.
Ultimately, Driscoll alone rescues Ann and they escape to the arms of their comrades who have laid a trap for Kong.
Captured, Kong is taken back to New York and put on display. He escapes on opening night and searches for Ann, trashing the city in the process. In the end, he takes her to the top of the Empire State building where the planes kill him – or some would say that beauty kills him.
Analysis
Why remake a classic? That’s a question that has haunted filmmakers since movies began. From a studio’s perspective the answer is simple: money. For the filmmaker: Perhaps it is the opportunity to present their own image or perhaps to retell a story that was not perfectly realized before. Perhaps it is an opportunity to bring a story to a new audience that might not see it otherwise.
Why do people get so up in arms when someone attempts a new version of a classic? Is it any different than a stage production? How many different version of Macbeth have their been? Or Tom Jones? Or You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown? Do people get up in arms about that? Of course not! There is no good reason not to remake a movie if there’s a reason or an audience eager to see it.
Why remake King Kong? It is one of the defining movies of the entire industry. It is not based on a novel, therefore there is no source material to go back to an reinterpret. It was brilliantly executed and has inspired many of the movie industry greats to be what they are today – Peter Jackson included.
The logic apparently was that, being an old black and white film it is inaccessible to modern audiences (read: children and teenagers). Certainly, they would never consider re-issuing the original to theaters.
I’m not going to beat around the bush, I welcomed Peter Jackson’s attempt at remaking Kong. Clearly, he loves the original as much as I do and clearly he is the man to bring such a huge spectacle to the screen. If there was one thing I could complain about the original film, it was that there was not enough of the dinosaurs and Kong on Skull island.
In my prelude to this entry I disclosed that I did not see the theatrical release, I have only seen this, the deluxe extended DVD edition.
I’m sorry to say but this film is a major letdown and a bit of a mess.
The first problem is the story. The original Kong characters are all here, but they’ve been subtly (or not so subtly) re-worked for no good reason. A series of sub-plots have unnecessarily been added. Carl Denham’s character has been made into a seedy con man, perhaps to match actor Jack Black’s beady little eyes. (Certainly no one could imagine him as a heroic character.) Driscoll is now an artist – a famous writer of Broadway plays. Probably most changed is Ann Darrow. No longer is Ann the terrified screaming damsel-in-distress, now she’s that previously mentioned spunky young thoroughly modern missy. Her character now helps drive the film. Drive it she does, right into the ground.
Unlike Lord of the Rings, which benefits from the extra screen time, King Kong does not. The extended sea voyage is wasted celluloid. The numerous slow motion facial expression shots are pointless and annoying. This is a film that could use a good editor.
Making Ann into a more modern woman fails this story miserably. While it could be understood why she might be grateful to Kong for protecting her or even feel sorry for him when he’s going to die, her interaction with Kong in New York is just too “involvedâ€. She stops his rampage by giving herself up to him. OK, maybe. it’s very heroic of her, but what would it actually accomplish? They go to Central Park and they go ice skating. (Seriously, was that in the theatrical version?!) They climb to the top of the Empire State building and, when Kong leaves her at a lower level, she doesn’t go inside and get away, she climbs up after him, towards the airplanes firing away. She tries to stop the planes! She might be more modern and gutsy, but she is too stupid to live.
I realize that her character was updated because, in this day and age you can’t have wilting girls who can’t stand on their own two feet and fight with the best of the men because the audiences can’t sympathize with her. Well that’s bullshit. For starters, Arnold Schwarzenegger would be crying like a little baby if a 60 foot gorilla picked him up and carried him around. Second, I hope no one in the audience could sympathize with anyone that stupid. If so, those people could also probably sympathize with the box of popcorn they picked up at the concession stand on the way in. I’m going to say, the popcorn has got more going for it in the brain department than Ann Darrow.
The second area of film that failed me, and I hate to say it, are the special effects. That’s not quite right, because they are brilliant. Particularly some of the facial shots of Kong were unbelievably good. Ignoring the face, because that’s just a human actor being computer projected onto Kong, but I mean the actual rendering of Kong himself. The hair on Kong’s head. The light glinting across that hair, lighting up some of the strand and not others in a perfectly natural way. These effects are absolutely stunning.
Then why did they fail me? They failed because of their integration with the human actors.
When Ann is first taken by Kong, he’s none too gentle with her. He’s shaking her around like he’s mixing a can of spray paint. She’s dead. Spine snapped. Story over. Yet somehow she lives.
When the rescue party encounter the Styrachosaurus, it is thrashing its horns, head and tail around like nobody’s business. Some characters are flung by the creature enormous distances, landing on rotting broken up wood and debris, but they get up, alive. Others magically seem to duck under the head and tail, or even between the legs. It’s patently unbelievable.
And it gets worse. There is an Apatasaurus stampede, in which the entire party manage to run under their trampling feet, mostly surviving and an extended sequence where giant bugs of all nasty kinds attach the crew and they valiantly hold them off for a long time, again totally unbelievably. At one point, a young boy shoots crickets off Driscoll using a tommy gun. Driscoll never gets hit.
Of course, a movie like this is supposed to suspend disbelief, but once a movie looses that suspension, it can never get it back. I could no longer suspend my disbelief after only a short time on Skull island, after that I was literally angry and annoyed at the film for trying to feed me so much bullshit.