I wrote this for my long gone column in G-Fan back in the day, and thought it would be fun to revisit. I'll be doing some of these here and there.
KING KONG (2005)
An ode to excess.
There’s a good movie in this bloated beast, but Peter Jackson
really needs to find out what an editor is for. It’s like he had
to top every part of the original movie- it has one t rex, we have
three! Instead of one pteranodan we have a swarm of bat things. And
the added spider pit sequence proved that removing it from the
original was the right idea. The constant video game like motion of
the camera was very disturbing as well, and added to the overuse of
slow motion really made parts of the movie hard to watch. Every
scene with the “monsters” was too long.
There is a lot to
like about the movie- the cast is good, even the usually disagreeable
Jack Black (though he really needed to be about 20 years older to
make the part completely his). The opening third, set in NYC works
very well. However, after Ann becomes attached to Kong, she seems to
be rather disturbed and in need of some psychiatric care, a strange
case of “The Stockholm Syndrome” to be sure. It started to turn
into a remake of the previous needless remake from '76.
Unlike the 76 film, this Kong comes off as
this spoiled gorilla- and JUST a big ape, not the mythic monster god
of Skull Island the original is. He looks more like Mighty Joe Young
than King Kong. Not once in the movie is he ever referred to as
“King” Kong, and barely referred to as Kong either. The effects
are almost all well done, except for the first dinosaurs we see.
There are some strange lapses in physics that jar the viewers out of
the movie- Kong shaking Ann like a rag doll, snapping her head back
and forth. Our eyes tell us she would at least have a broken neck.
And this is the least of the physics problems!
All in all, the
movie fails because of the many small things it got wrong. A shorter
movie would have eliminated them, only to be released in the extended
DVD version of the movie (of which there will still surely be).
Remember when a movie was self contained, and didn’t need to add
extra scenes BACK in to explain a plot point? One can say you have
to forget logic in a movie about a giant gorilla, but when it tries
so hard to LOOK realistic and then doesn’t, well, this is what you
get. People have told me that this is just nitpicking, but when so
many “nits” are swarming about, it gets hard to ignore them. It's death by a thousand cuts.
However,
it’s slightly better than the 76 remake, and much like that ‘film’ and
gino has provided us as fans with many cool things- the King Kong
cartoon DVDs, the Toho Kong movies on DVD. So I am thankful Jackson
did remake this movie, even though it proved once again that KING
KONG did not ever need a
remake.
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