Kong vs. Kong

The contenders are my favorite movie of all time and a *remake* by some
guy from a backwater where Christmas comes in the middle of summer.
Remakes...how well I remember the efforts of a man who calls himself
Dino DeLaurentis (a name that shall endure in infamy, a name that I
have been known to utter as a curse on some occasions). Remake King
Kong! Let's rewrite the Bible and the Magna Carta! Can we punch up
Shakespeare while we're at it?
For almost fifty years I have loved King Kong discovering new layers
with each viewing (perhaps as many as 100 as of this writing. Viewings,
not layers) I watched it again today shortly after seeing Peter
Jackson's version in the theater.
Peter Jackson wrote a script about ten years ago that has made the
rounds on the internet and reads really well. One could tell just on
the strength of this document that his vision was far clearer than that
of DeLaurentis (P-tui!), not that a blind oaf couldn't have. The
current film is not the 1996 script. Jackson is responsible for a film
I rather enjoyed called "Forgotten Silver". I saw this made for tv
"mocumentary" for the first time shortly after I read his Kong Script,
and much about it convinced met that he may indeed be up to making
Kong. We had to wait, though. He was still an obscure name in the world
of film at that time, still living in the world's remotest nation. He
had to devote many years to producing a glossy three part setting of a
third-rate fairy tale to become marketable enough to make King Kong. I
suppose the end justifies the means. Jackson insists that the goal of
remaking King Kong is why he became a film maker. I will grant that it
is hard to discern that ambition in films like "Bad Taste".

There will be spoilers, my friends. You have been warned.
Let us compare the efforts on 1933 with 2005.
In Cooper and Schoedsack's King Kong, the principal (human)
character, filmmaker Carl Denham as portrayed by Robert Armstrong, is
an adventurer. He is, in fact modeled rather closely after Merian C.
Cooper. Cooper is as close to a real life Indiana Jones as we have ever
seen. Armstrong gives us a jovial, good-hearted (if somewhat
over-reaching) producer who wants to show the world the greatest thing
it has ever seen.
Denham as portrayed by Jack Black in 2005, is a much darker
character. He is at odds with his studio and starts off his adventure
on the run from the law. It just gets worse. On so many occasions when
it comes down to saving a colleague or the film, the choice for him is
not even difficult and the human being doesn't come out on top. This
Carl Denham just isn't a real good guy.
In Cooper and Schoedsack's King Kong, Jack Driscoll is the first mate
of the Venture. He is the classic self contained man of the sea. He is
exactly the guy you expect to be a hero when heroism is called for.
Driscoll in Jackson's Kong is a playwright, a man who one suspect's has
never been outside of the five boroughs. He rises to heroism, but the
audience never dreams he has ever been there before.
Ann Darrow in the 1933 film had little back story. All of her
character depended on the beauty and personality of Fay Wray. All we
knew about her was that she had done some extra work.
In Jackson's film, Ann Darrow is a slapstick comic working the
vaudeville circuit. She has also found herself out of work and
encounters Denham just as she refuses to lower herself to stripping for
a living. She is very athletic and this makes much of the action of the
film a lot more plausible.
King Kong... In Cooper and Schoedsack's film Kong is just there. He
is the living god of a lost island. Kong is a gigantic gorilla, or is
he? He seems not to resemble a living gorilla all that much. He is more
bipedal than quadrupedal with an easy erect stance. His face is very
un-gorilla-like. His facial expressions are very human. He has white
eyes like a human rather than dark eyes like an ape. Kong is not a
gorilla, Kong is a kong, a type of anthropoid ape that attains a size
of 25 feet or more.
Peter Jackson's Kong is a gorilla, albeit a vary large one, in both
look and behavior even down to the slight gray "saddle" marking on his
back. He is perceptibly very old, perhaps hundreds of years old, and
covered with scars. Unlike African gorillas, he has spent most of his
life fighting some of the most dangerous beasts that one could ever
imagine. African gorillas only fight when cornered so one guesses that
this Kong finds himself cornered a lot.
Interestingly, there is fossil evidence of an orangutan relative
that once lived in Asia that attained Son of Kong/Mighty Joe Young type
proportions. He lived there around the same time early humans did and
must have occasionally scared the bejesus out of them when they
disturbed one.

Skull Island. In the 1933 film, Skull Island was seemingly once the
heart of some great civilization. The people who currently lived there
certainly didn't build that wall and one presumes that they were
descendants of people who discovered the island after the original
human inhabitants had died out.
The dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts that inhabit the island on
the other side of the wall are part of no understandable ecology. There
are many types represented, but there can't bee too many of them on
such a small island. If you pay careful notice to Denham's map and
compare it to the size of the inhabited peninsula, you realize that the
island is no bigger than Tahiti. To support that kind of fauna, it
would have to be at least as big as Borneo. This is seemingly explained
in the movie Son of Kong when it is revealed that the island is
sinking. One presumes that the final swallowing by the ocean depicted
in that film is merely the last gasp of a process that has been going
on for centuries. This casts Skull Island as sort of a South Seas
Atlantis. Once it was huge with vast wild lands where dinosaurs and
kongs roamed free and here and there were the cities of a great
civilization that was capable of building huge structures of stone and
great temples honoring gods for whom we have no name.
Jackson's film seems to take place on this same Skull Island, the
only apparent difference is that the natives appear to be actual
descendants of the original inhabitants. They seem far more savage and
brutal and far less cultured than those of the 1933 film. They are not
colonists in a new land, they are the sad remnant of a people who were
once great. They are now shell shocked and brutalized by the declining
environment of their world.
The dinosaurs of Jackson's film, like those of Cooper and
Schodesack's, are both larger and more confrontational than their
ancient counterparts. The behavior can be chalked up to environmental
pressure and competition for very limited resources. None of the
creatures in Jackson's Kong seem to be exact representatives of animals
in the fossil record and that's probably a good thing in a fantasy
film.

Peter Jackson's King Kong is a little short of twice the runtime of
the 1933 original. We are an hour into the film before we even see
Skull Island. That time is devoted to good stuff, lots of character
development. We get to know Denham, Driscoll and Ann as well as the
crew of the Venture and the film crew. While it is time well spent, it
slows the picture down enormously. The extra character development does
pay off and I was never bored, but some of it could have been dispensed
with. I'll get to that later.
The 1930's New York City is an amazing recreation. I don't think
anything like it has ever been attempted. The Civil War era New York of
Scorsese's Gangs of New York comes close, but I think this has it beat.
My only real criticism is that I would have expected to have seen more
horse-drawn vehicles in the streets. In the era before World War II, a
great number of delivery vans were horse-drawn rather than gas powered.
This, I will grant, is a minor quibble.
Skull Island is the most forbidding wilderness imaginable and the
creatures that inhabit it are amazing. In one scene stampeding
brontosaurs crowd through a slot canyon like a river of flesh. In
another, Kong defends Ann from a trio of creatures a tyrannosaur
relative called vastatosaurus rex and they are as big and mean as they
come. The things that Jackson does with these animals are like nothing
that the stop-motion artists of the past could have considered. The
proximity with human actors, the number of animated creatures on screen
and the kinds of positions in which they are animated is simply beyond
the bounds of the stop-motion animator's craft. The scene in which ann,
Kong and the v. rexs plunge into the canyon and end up suspended from
vines, one of them swinging back and forth to snap menacingly at Ann
when he swings close. I will not review scene by scene, mostly because
you have already seen it, but suffice it to say that technologically,
the 1933 Kong cannot touch the 2005 Kong. It was not only the
technology, these scenes have extraordinary emotional content. It seems
tired to talk about being on the edge of one's seat, but honestly it
was all I could do to sit still through these scenes.
When the moment of Kong's escape in New York comes I was surprised
not to see him tear down the elevated train but the bit with the bus
was comparable. At this point we are led through a series of events
that culminates with Kong's death atop the Empire state. It is so well
filmed and scripted that I was deeply moved by the tragedy of the
events even though I knew exactly what was going to happen. It
was...Shakespearian.

There were some tributes to the 1933 film that I loved. On the ship
Jackson had the actors performing lines from the original Kong and in
the New York introduction of Kong, he recreated the native dance from
the original Kong. Very cool.

I loved this film. Honest, I did. That being said, there are things I
would change. About a half hour could be cut from this film easy. A lot
of the stuff with Denham and the Hollywood guys, some of the stuff that
happens on the ship, The entire sequence on the pond in Central Park,
about half of the screen time devoted to deep searching gazes from Ann,
we could loose all that stuff and the movie would be improved.



O.k., there is no doubt that this is a great movie made by a man with
overwhelming love for the material. In some ways he was fearless
pushing the envelope as far as he could. It was a real attempt to make
King Kong effect a 2005 audience the same way the 1933 version effected
those audiences. He wanted to show us what King Kong looked like then.
Pretty much a job well done sez I.

> There will be spoilers, my friends. You have been warned.
> Let us compare the efforts on 1933 with 2005.
> In Cooper and Schoedsack's King Kong, the principal (human)
> character, filmmaker Carl Denham as portrayed by Robert Armstrong, is
> an adventurer. He is, in fact modeled rather closely after Merian C.
> Cooper. Cooper is as close to a real life Indiana Jones as we have ever
> seen. Armstrong gives us a jovial, good-hearted (if somewhat
> over-reaching) producer who wants to show the world the greatest thing
> it has ever seen.
> Denham as portrayed by Jack Black in 2005, is a much darker
> character. He is at odds with his studio and starts off his adventure
> on the run from the law. It just gets worse. On so many occasions when
> it comes down to saving a colleague or the film, the choice for him is
> not even difficult and the human being doesn't come out on top. This
> Carl Denham just isn't a real good guy.

This isn't all that at odds with the old script's Denham. Honestly, reading
a little about Cooper and some of his cameramen, isn't all that at odds with
the real thing. Cooper was certainly less callous, but we see hints of
humanity in this Denham. It's just lost to the ambition.

> In Cooper and Schoedsack's King Kong, Jack Driscoll is the first mate
> of the Venture. He is the classic self contained man of the sea. He is
> exactly the guy you expect to be a hero when heroism is called for.
> Driscoll in Jackson's Kong is a playwright, a man who one suspect's has
> never been outside of the five boroughs. He rises to heroism, but the
> audience never dreams he has ever been there before.

Yeah, this was the one thing. The first mate and Driscoll sort of split the
old Driscoll role. We do get the idea that Driscoll is relatively plucky
though.

> Skull Island. In the 1933 film, Skull Island was seemingly once the
> heart of some great civilization. The people who currently lived there
> certainly didn't build that wall and one presumes that they were
> descendants of people who discovered the island after the original
> human inhabitants had died out.

> Jackson's film seems to take place on this same Skull Island, the
> only apparent difference is that the natives appear to be actual
> descendants of the original inhabitants. They seem far more savage and
> brutal and far less cultured than those of the 1933 film. They are not
> colonists in a new land, they are the sad remnant of a people who were
> once great. They are now shell shocked and brutalized by the declining
> environment of their world.

They are inbred. I wonder, though, why an obviously fishing people had no
boats.

> I loved this film. Honest, I did. That being said, there are things I
> would change. About a half hour could be cut from this film easy. A lot
> of the stuff with Denham and the Hollywood guys, some of the stuff that
> happens on the ship, The entire sequence on the pond in Central Park,
> about half of the screen time devoted to deep searching gazes from Ann,
> we could loose all that stuff and the movie would be improved.

I thought the central Park scene was useful. It's probably the first time in
his life that Kong wasn't fighting something and I think ti goes a long way
towards explaining Kong's mindset on the tower.

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-Wolf