It took me two attempts to watch King Kong. My good will for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy evaporated with the bloated The Hobbit trilogy so I was less willing to put my preconceived misgivings about a remake aside. The minute that I saw the natives, I turned the television off and let the movie expire from streaming Netflix queue without any regrets. If you don’t remove a movie from your queue, and it becomes available to watch by streaming again, it just reappears in your queue. When I got the alert that it was going to expire again, I just saw They Shall Not Grow Old two times in theaters so I was capable of being patient and watching the film in its entirety without multitasking even though all of my original misgivings still existed.
Unfortunately while I can understand how someone can enjoy Jackson’s remake, the majority of my misgivings were vindicated after watching King Kong. Three hours seven minutes is too damn long for a remake, especially when the original was only one hour forty minutes, and the first remake was two hours fourteen minutes long. I watched a longer drama with subtitles while Never Look(ing) Away. Length only matters if you are conscious of time passing, and as a kid, I vaguely remember seeing and enjoying the originals. Jackson’s vision is predominantly a homage that brings very little that is new to the table. It feels like a movie that you saw before even with all the changes and expansions. The only reason that I could tolerate it was appreciating that Jackson can’t help himself. If you see Lord of the Rings and They Shall Not Grow Old, you’ll realize that Jackson is a man obsessed with creating certain visions whether or not it belongs in the film that we are currently watching. He is a perfectionist who loves reveling in the time period and appreciates old movies, but in this case, this adoration shackles this film from having its own voice.
King Kong is racist. I love monster movies, which is why as a New Yorker, the idea of the titular ape and the Empire State Building is at the forefront, especially because they inflated a giant balloon of the ape and stuck it on the building in my lifetime, but as I got older, I thought, and it feels crazy to even articulate it, “Is this really a screed about miscegenation, and the stereotype of black men being obsessed with white women? The barbarian must be purged from the civilized world for it to exist.” Jackson takes great pains to purge this idea because King Kong’s casting is a Benetton ad, and there is no racism within the crew, which is probably ahistorical given the time period. Still racism is endemic and essential to the story. I did not rewatch the first two movies, but apparently Jackson’s version of the natives is the most vicious version. They reminded me of the orcs in his Lord of the Rings trilogy. Also did I see black face? It is kind of like trying to remake Birth of a Nation without racism. How? (Is that harsh? It feels harsh.)
King Kong is sexist. Jackson and Naomi Watts did their best to elevate and distinguish the leading lady from simply being a screaming, helpless victim in need of rescue. She is a career woman with integrity, dreams and a sense of humor, not just some sexy lady in a slip—more vaudeville than bombshell, but ultimately she still becomes the inevitable romantic interest of a leading man. She is a glorified Snow White to bigger animals.
If Jackson’s King Kong works, it is because of Andy Serkis, the man behind the CGI. He brings a level of nuance to the beast that is missing in most incarnations of the titular character. He is more of a spoiled, lonely child that never knew how to act with company, and she has to establish boundaries or end up dead from exhaustion. The whole thing becomes a tragedy, which it always was, but not a tragedy because he does not know his place in the hierarchy of the world and has unnatural desires, but because of lack of appreciation for the diversity and beauty of the natural world except if it feeds our greed. Maybe there was always a backstory for the beast, but I finally noticed it. Jackson only tells it visually, thankfully not through exposition, and through Serkis’ wordless acting. Kong gets some desperately needed depth as a character.
I have to give credit where credit is due as much as I hate to do it. I finally got invested as a viewer being entertained by King Kong as a movie about one hour forty-three minutes into the film when Kong meets Jurassic Park. It is the best sequence in the film, and Bryan Singer directed it, not Jackson. Damn it! Singer is an alleged pedophile and after an initially promising start to the franchise, is responsible for the dreadful X-Men movies that generally diminish in quality, but he delivered the sequence that appealed most to me as a viewer more interested in the animals than the people.
Please don’t conflate my lack of interest in the human storyline with a dismissal of the cast because King Kong’s cast is phenomenal. I like all of them, including Jack Black, whom I think failed to convince me that he was from that era. I’m an admirer of Thomas Kretschmann’s work. He never breaks character no matter how ridiculous his surroundings are. Jamie Bell is a better actor than the world is aware of, but he is given a fairly two-dimensional job. Only Kyle Chandler gets to act against type in a brief supporting, but memorable role. Remember when Adrien Brody had so much potential. Good times.
Can we please stop remaking King Kong? You can’t go home again. We expect more from people and movies so trying to spark the same magic that worked in the past is impossible and exhausting. Just enjoy your memories and move on. As a sci fi period piece, it may have been technically excellent, but it lacked the living, breathing soul that we come to expect from movies today. More importantly, it isn’t fun for the viewer, and it is self-indulgent for the filmmaker, even an earnest, generous, excellent one such as Jackson. It fails to answer the question of what purpose would a remake of an iconic movie in the twenty-first century serve for audiences today. It does not feel fresh or give us a new way of seeing the main character, King Kong, in a sustained way throughout the entire film. It is a film that does not fully embrace seeing the beast in a three dimensional way while definitely failing to make the centrally focused human characters as inherently interesting as they should be if they are the focus. Viewers can’t get invested in them because they feel more like impressions than real people.
If you’re a fan of the cast, Jackson or King Kong, then you should definitely see it, but I don’t think that it is worth your time. I’m not mad that I saw it; however I am underwhelmed. See Kong: Skull Island instead or a classic Hollywood film with no sci fi elements. Then you’ll see how Jackson’s film pales in comparison.