humanoid

From the very start, this movie is filled with striking cinematography, sharply drawn characters, and the promise of melodramatic riches, but it also exhibits a disconcerting lack of narrative drive.

Things happen, of course, and they surely must seem earthshaking to the characters involved (although the heroine seems a decade too old to be quite so naive about her cad of a boyfriend). But there's hardly any sense of dramatic tension, much less urgency. Indeed, the movie seems almost like an anthropological documentary, in which the camera spends much of its time dispassionately observing the behavior of ordinary folks at work and play, with little indication that the story is going anywhere in particular.

And then, with only minutes of running time to spare, out of the clear blue sky comes the (absurdly far-fetched) revelation that seals the protagonist's tragic fate.

There is much of interest here for students of film, or of the period of the Thirties, or of the movie's settings of town and port in Mexico. There's little psychological depth, though, and the most intriguing question about this "iconic" representative of the "film of sinners" genre is, What (aside from the boob shot) made such a seemingly dull story so compelling for the filmgoing public of its day?

I don't intend to derogate this movie, which is pretty damn good for what it is-- a modern Hollywood-style entertainment-- but what it is isn't KING KONG. I say this as a Peter Jackson fan, going back to MEET THE FEEBLES. I used to tell people that I knew LOTR was going to be great, because I'd seen PJ develop into a thrillingly good movie-maker. But with his remake of his favorite movie, he's fallen into a trap where his facility-- and, apparently, the lack of people who'll tell him any more when he's going overboard-- has led him astray.

I'd take issue with people who declare the CGI flawless-- there were times, for instance during the brontosaur stampede, when it looked positively cheesy. But that's beside the point. The original KONG wasn't a great movie because of convincing SFX.

I must report that the word that kept popping up in my mind while watching KK was: "preposterous." It seems silly to harp on the logical inconsistencies of what is frankly a fantasy. But, think about that aforementioned dinosaur stampede. Could you really buy, for even one moment, the idea that anybody at all could have survived that situation and walked away? What about those fights to the death that KK keeps having with a variety of different monstrous critters, while holding tiny, delicate Ann Darrow in one paw? And he never, ever, is momentarily indelicate enough to even crack one of her ribs?

Here's another one: it's so cold in New York City that the streets are slick with ice. The skating pond in Central Park is so thickly iced that it can support the weight of a twenty-foot-tall gorilla. So when skinny little Ann is climbing a ladder on top of the Empire State Building, dressed in a thin, spaghetti-strapped gown, wouldn't you think her hands would be so numb with cold that she could barely hold on? For that matter, even if the building itself weren't slick with ice, can you conceive that any primate could climb and swing about the structure, high above the ground, without losing its grip? But Jackson's Kong clings to walls like a spider, as if by magic.

I'm not even going to get into Ann's weirdly intense, frankly erotic bond with Kong.

My most fundamental objection to PJ's KK is that it dismisses the aspect of this story that even DeLaurentiis's abominable remake understood is crucial-- that Kong represents the irresistible intrusion into our lives of horrors that are terrifying and uncanny. This is what has given KING KONG its lasting power, and this is what Jackson's impulse for sentimentalizing the story disregards. PJ wants us to empathize with Kong, to love the big ape.

The original KING KONG offers us an archetypal monster who only becomes sympathetic after we've been fully impressed with its capacity for turning our idea of a safe, predictable world upside down.

I first saw KING KONG at the ideal age, five or six, when nothing stood between my tender sensibilities and its overweening message of tragic doom. Conventional and glib as Robert Armstrong sounded when his Carl Denham said "It was Beauty who killed the Beast," he is a speaker of profound truths when compared to Jack Black intoning the same line, in a narrative where Beauty has done everything but pick up a Tommy gun to defend the Beast she's come to love.

In trying to make the tragic monster lovable, Jackson has betrayed everything that made King Kong more than just another creature feature monster. Jackson's tragedy is that he seems constitutionally incapable of having done it any other way.