Movie Review: King Kong
King Kong: Torgo disapprovesWhat a silly movie.
Not that silly is bad. But it's also an incredibly pretentious movie. Silly and pretentious don't mix well.
I understand that Peter Jackson had to make The Lord of the Rings as 3+ hr epics. They were big books. Tolkien got carried away, so the source material was overblown.
But King Kong is, at its heart, a simple story. People go to Skull Island. Big ape. Big ape comes back to NYC. Havoc ensues. Does it really need to be a 3+ hour movie?
No. Here's how it could be shorter:
1) The old guy at the beginning going back to Chicago -- that plotline exists to highlight Naomi Watts' character's problems keeping friends. That could've been achieved with a line of dialogue, not an entire sequence.
2) Getting Adrien Brody on the boat. Just have him tagging along. The 10 minutes spent on on getting him there against his will is just fluff.
3) Getting to Skull Island. That's practically a movie in itself, none of it good.
4) The natives. Creepy? Yes. In the original? Yes. Appropriate representation of a native culture (no matter how messed up their island may be)? No. The darkest of the dark natives with their crazy ceremonies and bloodlust for white blondes is inherently offensive. Cut that.
5) The bugs in the canyon. Ok, I just don't like bug scenes. Didn't we accomplish this with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom?
6) Ice skating in the park. Really? A 25-foot ape doesn't just crack the ice? And he doesn't mind the freezing cold? And Naomi Watts is in a thin dress, so there's a fundamental gap in the logic of ice and temperature.
7) The Empire State Building. I swear, if Naomi Watts climbed one more ladder (and, by the way, shouldn't it have been far too cold for all that high-altitude climbing in a nightgown?)... and then the ladder breaks, but Adrien Brody climbs it to come get her.
8) Back to Skull Island, the brontosaurus (or whatever they were) stampede. It was cool, sort of, until the special effects became so transparent that it just seemed sadly fake.
9) Ok, and the first mate/Jimmy story. You know one of those guys is gonna be a red shirt. They're just dragging out the plot so one is a red shirt with emotional resonance. But then, of course, the black guy dies.
10) The T-Rex in the canyon, swinging on the vines, trying to eat Naomi Watts. Just typing that makes me feel dumb.
Ok, ok. Again, silly can be good. Independence Day is a silly movie. It has its pretensions, but it's not over 3 hours long. And it doesn't Frodo the ending by dragging things out. We all know the ape likes the girl but the ape has to fall off the building he climbed. Stop showing me the cameos and in-jokes of the fighter pilots (one is the guy who played Kong in the 70's version! How pointless! Another is Frank Darabont, director of the Shawshank Redemption! How odd!).
And then there are all the slow motion shots, Jack Black making his facial expressions, Adrien Brody looking like Droopy Dog, and, well, ok, that's enough.
posted by Torgo @ 10:43 AM
3 Comments:
there is a fundamental problem in your logic in regard to #6. if you watched the film, you would know that watts was woman on the chorus line. i don't know whether you have ever seen women on chorus lines, but they often wear thin dresses, not overcoats. she ran out of the theatre because of what was happening. i can tell you from someone who has been to war that one does not always notice that one is wearing something too thin when in the 'heat of battle,' in which she found himself. that is why she was wearing what she wore when she was on the hard ice of central park.
don't you get silly now.
I understand that you liked Naomi Watts in that dress. That's cool. But the point of #6 is the ice not cracking under the weight of a gigantic gorilla.
IMDB notes this:
Factual errors: The ice on the pond is strong enough to support Kong's massive weight and bulk, but Ann is wearing tropical (warm weather) clothing, and no jacket. To have ice thick enough to support a 25 foot gorilla, the outside temperature would have to be close to 20 below zero for a considerable length of time. Temperatures that cold would cause frostbite in about 45 seconds at maximum and death in about two to five minutes to anyone wearing only warm weather clothing and no jacket.
Whoever wrote that seems a bit obsessive (perhaps a LOTR fan), but I think it's basically a sound argument.
There's loving a gorilla, then there's freezing your legs off.
Haven't seen this latest version, but we had to watch the original as part of a class in college. It was pretty much hands-down interpreted as a movie about saving the "civilized/white" capitalist world (visually NYC and Fay Wray) from "foreign/savage" influences.
That resonated for a 1930s audience, crumbling under the Depression and retreating into a cultural and political isolationist policy.
If Peter Jackson's film is pretty true to the original, what in that resonates with a 21st century audience? Oh, wait....
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