King Kong Movie Review:


I have always had affection for the original 1933 classic monster film, King Kong. I am not sure why but from such a young age I have been enthralled by “creature features”. The thing that always stood out the most for me when it came to Kong was the over-the-top classic Hollywood ending that I am sure is one of the most memorable ever. I don’t know why the death of a monster is so tragic in that film unlike so many others, but it made for cinematic magic.

Then there was the 1976 version which starred Jessica Lange and Jeff Bridges and I have to say I cringe every time the film is mentioned. Overtime, I have dubbed it “Man-in-suit” Kong.

I have even witnessed some of the spinoffs and sequels to Kong. The pseudo-classic “Son of Kong” (1933) and the brilliant “Might Joe Young” (1949) are probably the best kinds of continuations for the story. But then there is the very laughable and horrendous “Kong Lives” from 1986 which starred Linda Hamilton who discovers that Kong survived his infamous plunge in 1976 New York. There is also the 1998’s kid-friendly and what-were-they-thinking “Mighty Joe Young” with Charlize Theron and Bill Paxton.

There has always been a fascination with giant animal films and Kong seems to be the pinnacle of that desire. So I guess I am not surprised that once more we have another Kong incarnation but this time there is director Peter Jackson and a $200 million plus budget.

Jackson’s version is in part a homage to the original 1933 version where we find a desperate movie producer Carl Denham (Jack Black) trying to make his vision for his latest film come true. Denham is obsessed and finds struggling actress Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) to fill the void after his leading lady vanishes. To enhance his film further Denham uses hot New York playwright Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody). The trio end up on a ship bound for an island Denham has dubbed Skull Island to shoot the movie.

After descending through a murky cloud cover, the ship arrives on the island where they discover hostile natives and a giant wall. After barely making their way back to the ship, Ann is abducted by the natives and offered to their island god. The god being a giant 25-foot gorilla named Kong who has a mean disposition and survival instinct. Ann is taken by Kong.

As the shipmates struggle to mount a rescue mission, Ann begins to understand the mighty ape. And unbeknownst to Ann and her new island protector, that they have a fateful date with the Big Apple.

Jackson has done a lot of things to update and enhance this story. First of all he has toned down the male lead in the film from the brooding ship’s first mate to Brody’s “hero-in-training” screenwriter. This angle allows for the development between Kong and Ann to intensify.

Secondly he has added oodles of back story and added at least half a dozen new characters.

Probably the biggest change is that Jackson didn’t turn his giant ape into a monster but into the animal he is. What is strange is that is what they tried to do in 1998’s Godzilla and it met with disastrous results. Here it is an over-whelming success. Kong is not ever perceived as anything more than an animal and when Ann’s affections for the big lug intensify Jackson carves the film into a “heroic-tragedy”.

I think for me what was the most amazing thing about the film was Naomi Watts. She is utterly mind-blowing and my god, her eyes. This woman’s performance has such raw emotion, laced with intense fear, sadness and hope. She is beautiful, strong, loving and at times poetic. No wonder she could tame the wild beast.

What is even more amazing is the fact that she has all this raw emotion and she is acting to green screen and a yellow ping-pong ball for eye level. How does she do that?

Watts deserves an Oscar nomination just for the ability to deliver all that emotion with nothing there. I have never seen it done so flawlessly. When is Hollywood going to honor actors who have to act against green screen? She is brilliant.

I also have to hand it to Peter Jackson, his version of Kong is probably the best CGI created character ever to date. His first collaboration with Andy Serkis as Gollum was amazing but Kong takes that one step further.

I liked the casting of Jack Black as Denham who seemed to be perfect for the insane movie director and he was able to emulate the Carl Denham from the 1933 film perfectly. I also got used to Brody as the male lead but thank goodness he wasn’t playing the rugged sailor-type like in the original film.

One of the slight problems I had with the film was obviously its length. The original suffered from an overly long jungle sequence but Jackson’s version extended beginning and end feels extremely trying at times. The whole solo-character scenes leading up to the ship and exiting it made me quite bored.

I also felt that Jackson’s Kong also had two very distinct themes. One was the whole eyes thing. Each of the four main characters (including CGI Kong) acts solely through their eyes and deliver lots and lots of different kinds of emotion. Jackson’s film is full of long tight focused shots on his character’s eyes. I really loved that and felt that Watts really benefited from that angle. The second theme is there are a lot of extra “insane falls”. Men, dinosaurs, Kong and the main actors all take death-defying falls at some point. Jackson does so much fore-shadowing I got distracted and bugged at how unlikely surviving some of the jungle falls was.

As a whole I have to say I enjoyed Kong a lot but in the end I have to say that for me it was more about the beauty than the beast.

So Says the Soothsayer



Dean Kish

With his movie about to be taken out of his hands, director Carl Denham (Black) steals filmmaking equipment from the studio and charters Captain Englehorn’s (Kretschmann) ship the Venture. This is because he has procured a map to an undiscovered island that is filled with mystery, an ideal place to shoot his picture. All he needs is a leading lady to bring writer Jack Driscoll’s (Brody) script to life but as the Great Depression grips New York and no one wants to work with him, Carl sees a vision of beauty in Ann Darrow (Watts). When they finally arrive at the island, they discover a place that is completely out of time, filled with creatures that were thought to be extinct or shouldn’t even exist and natives that worship strongest of them all, Kong.

Hollywood’s obsession with looking to the past for ideas continues but when Peter Jackson announced he was going to remake the 1933 original you know that was going to be a special update of ‘King Kong’.

When it comes to remaking a movie that is rightly defined as a classic of its era you need to find someone who will pay homage to the original but be able to update it for a modern cinema audience and in Peter Jackson you have that filmmaker. When someone confesses that the original is his favourite film that made him want to be a filmmaker in the first place and that he has been wanting to remake it since he was twelve years-old, you know that you have someone who will treat the material with the respect it deserves.

The best thing about this new version of ‘King Kong’ is the decision that the filmmakers took to set the film in the original time frame. The 1933 setting allows Jackson and his team to utilise the skills they learnt on the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy to recreate New York at that time and then really go to town on Skull Island. A modern Kong didn’t work in the ill-conceived 1976 remake and it wouldn’t especially have worked now, so a period setting was the best option and the ultimate homage to the original.

The production design on the movie is extraordinary with the boffins at WETA throwing all of their creative skills into the frame. The film combines the brilliant set design, astoundingly realistic miniatures and CGI effects that raise the bar again. From the recreation of New York during the Great Depression in the 1930s to the jungles and ruins of Skull Island, the film looks simply stunning throughout and shows again that anything a filmmaker can imagine is now possible on film.

The creatures of Skull Island also pay homage to era. The dinosaurs have the traditional look of how palaeontologists and filmmakers envisioned these creatures in 1933 and they have even included a giant iguana. The T-Rexs, brontosaurus and raptors look like their stop-motion brethren but with much more animation and realism that comes with the modern technology used to bring them to life. They also go to town on the insect inhabitants of the island to create a sequence that is not for the squeamish. This is the film at its most frightening and the reason for the 12A (PG-13) certificate.

The King of the creatures however is Kong himself. WETA digital and motion capture performer and star Andy Serkis set the standard with Gollum in the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy but with Kong they have raised the bar to an unprecedented level. The huge gorilla looks real and is again brought to life via the brilliance of Andy Serkis. Peter Jackson’s virtual performer of choice dons the motion capture suit again to create the movement for Kong but it is the facial capture technology that really brings the character to life. This gives Kong a personality as he reacts to situations and creates a bond with Ann. These attributes make Kong the star and the battle hardened, lonely gorilla now has an even more emotional bond with the audience.

The human actors are much more fleshed out than in the original. Now with more than an hour worth of development time in the act, taking place in New York and on the Venture we become more invested in the characters. Jack Black’s Carl Denham is a man obsessed with his film and is willing to sacrifice anything to get footage that will make his name. It could have been so easy to make Denham the over the top villain of the piece but Jack Black makes him a character might be the most reprehensible person on the screen but he is one that you can’t take your eyes off. In a change from the original Jack Driscoll character, Adrien Brody now plays the character as a screenwriter and not as the Venture’s First Mate. This is a real leading man role for the Oscar winning actors and he does an excellent job in creating a 30s style screen hero with a heart. Kyle Chandler is excellent as 30s film star Bruce Baxter, who is obsessed more with saving his own skin than recreating his onscreen persona. Colin Hanks as Driscoll’s assistant Preston and Thomas Kretschmann’s Captain Englehorn are not as developed however. There is also a strange subplot about the relationship between Jamie Bell’s Jimmy and Evan Parke’s Hayes, which serves nothing to the main story and is completely forgotten about as soon as they leave Skull Island.

The star of the show however is Naomi Watts. Taking on one of the most famous female roles in screen history was always going to be an arduous task for any actress but she proves again that she is one of the best actresses working in Hollywood at the moment. Ann Darrow’s interaction with Kong has to be the heartbeat of the film and if it didn’t work, neither would the movie but Watts makes the relationship believable and plausible. She sees the giant gorilla for what he is, a lonely animal who just wants some company and it is the actress’s skill to portray emotions to nothing (because the CG Kong wasn’t there during filming of course) that makes the character so understandable.

The film isn’t without its problems however. The three hours plus running time might be far too long for some people to watch in one sitting at the cinema. The New York/Venture character development of the first act doesn’t all seem necessary and makes the film quite slow at first. The Skull Island sequence is slightly overlong with one too many set pieces. Also you can tell that the film needed a little more postproduction time, as some of the CGI isn’t as good in some scenes as it is in others, especially when it comes to hiding the fact that most of the scenes were shot against green screens. The film’s main failing is inherent of all remakes of classic movies, you know what is coming. The shortcomings of the original story also come to bear, with the lack of backstory about the history of the island been the most obvious failing.

‘King Kong’ is a labour of love for Peter Jackson and his team. While it might be slightly over indulgent in parts and in length, this still proves that the director is on his way to becoming a cinematic genius that he has already been labelled by some. Kong is as big a movie as the gorilla himself and shows again how big budget event movies should be made. The film is worth seeing for the final act alone as Kong rampages through New York and driven to scaling the Empire State Building. The visual effects for this sequence are quite simply stunning and some of the best ever put to film. This is a monster movie on every scale and one that shouldn’t be missed.

Jamie Kelwick

After 10 hours of The Lord of the Rings, it's no surprise that Jackson can make a spectacular action film with emotional depth. This remake is thrilling on every level. Even if it's also rather self-indulgent.

Carl Denham (Black) is a 1933 filmmaker desperate to get his movie made, even if it means stealing the footage and sneaking off with cast and crew to an uncharted island. Once there, they discover an ancient civilisation and a lot of unusually enormous animals, including the massive gorilla Kong (motion-performance by Serkis) who falls for and runs off with actress Ann Darrow (Watts). The ship's crew and the film's writer Jack Driscoll (Brody), who also has a crush on Ann, launch a rescue. Next stop: New York.

Jackson and his cowriters have expanded this story in every conceivable direction, giving even small side characters meaningful back-stories, witty dialog and huge moral dilemmas. While adds texture, it also extends the length. This is a huge gorilla of a movie that reaches out and grabs onto us in every conceivable way, and keeps us utterly gripped through all three thunderous, action-packed hours.

It helps that the cast is full of solid actors like Watts, Brody, Bell and Kretschmann, plus superb scene-stealers like Black and Chandler. We even get to see Serkis on screen in a second role, as the ship's cook. And it also helps that Jackson's Weta provided the astounding effects work, which is simply jaw-dropping, even though most of it looks like effects work. But the action sequences are heart-pounding in every conceivable way--thrilling, freaky, grisly and even emotionally wrenching.

Alas, this excellence doesn't really make the film any more than a monster movie, complete with both illogical (Ann survives Kong's first romp with her through the jungle?) and cornball (ice skating?) scenes. And for all the human drama, Jackson never adds any relevance at all. The 1976 remake wins on that score; it's about corporate greed and the danger of environmental destruction, neither of which are touched on here. This film's strengths are artistic genius and emotional heart. And it's also colossally entertaining.

Rich Cline

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