All Beast, No Beauty

If this review seems muddled, incoherent or otherwise grammatically challenged, I beg your forgiveness. I just finished the film. It is 2 a.m. You get the point.

I have two copies of each of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films on my shelf. One is the original theatrical release and the other is the extended Director’s cut. The theatrical versions are already long, each clocking in around three hours. The director’s cut, which inserts deleted scenes, runs nearly four. With the exception of two or three scenes, I felt the deleted segments deserved their place on the cutting room floor. While interesting or entertaining, they all, in one way or another, either slowed the film down or played self-indulgently.

Don’t look for an extended cut of Peter Jackson’s King Kong—the theatrical version is the extended cut. Overlong by half, hedonistically animated and decadently self-indulgent King Kong is beastly to be sure, but there is little beauty here.

This is not to say it’s a bad film. It’s not. But as no one bothered to tap George Lucas on the shoulder at any point in the past decade and say, “Um sir,…these new Star Wars movies you’ve written…well, they’re complete rubbish” so no one was brave enough to confront the new master of smoke and mirrors and insist on the inclusion of the one job that seemed hopelessly lacking here—an editor.

The usual and oft-deserved complaint you hear from many film purists is that the advent of CGI has allowed filmmakers to run afoul of good, old-fashioned storytelling. They complain that the story oftentimes takes the backseat to the effects. On King Kong, they have found the definitive case study in a film that uses its computerized brushes not for the sake of dramatic velocity, but simply because they can. That sort of wild abandon—the impulse to create magic and wonder for its own sake is a perfectly viable and I would argue, necessary element of cinemagic. However, when special effects are presented narcissistically as they are here, when they serve no other purpose than to showcase the bravado of the artist, when they exist solely so that someone can thump their chest as the great ape, and cry, “Look what I can do” they cease being magic and become the very worst kind of cheap parlor tricks.

The effects are naturally fantastic—awe-inspiring even, but Jackson and his incredibly talented team at Weta Workshops do not simply cross the line, they gleefully throw themselves over it. These are special effects as white noise and they will leave your eyes and ears ringing at the expense of doing the same to your heart. This is Jackson at his most self-gratifying. And he simply doesn’t know when to stop.

After seeing Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring, my mother complained that the entire film was simply one climax followed by another climax followed by another climax. Uneven, repetitive and completely forced (to her), she lost any sense of care and concern for the characters, any sense of immersion within the fantasy world. She should stay as far away from King Kong as possible. Here, our characters literally turn around from one crisis to another without a chance to catch their breath, much less utter a line of intelligent dialogue. Dinosaurs stampede, lizards give chase, Kong and T-Rexes engage in a sort of primal WWF Smackdown, giant bugs menace and massive bats attack. And somehow, in the midst of all this, one very large ape and one very beautiful woman are supposed to meet and fall in…well, something.

This is the part that the film does well. Trounces the original and its first clumsy remake, actually. Here we truly believe that Kong could love this tiny human woman. And more importantly, we can believe that Ann Darrow could care for Kong. The movie allows time for the two to create a relationship, such as it is. Kong is digitally rendered with breathtaking realism. Not satisfied with wide shots, Jackson insists on dozens of close-ups on his beast’s face. Not only do these intimate shots come off with absolute believability, but they reveal that the eyes are the windows to this beast’s soul and they say more than any bit of scripted dialogue ever could. (Andy Sirkis, whose bodily movements were digitally captured and became the template for Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, here provides the same stunning achievement in bringing the 25 foot tall primate to life with utter realism. Once again, his is the best actor nod that will sadly, never be.)

If Sirkis is fantastic as Kong and Naomi Watts is stunning as Ann, Jack Black is terribly miscast as the egotistical and self-absorbed director, Carl Denham. Going for a caricature, Jackson gets instead, a comedian. And what did he expect? Oh, Black’s a fine enough actor and no one is denying his uproarious humor, but here, in this film, in this role? It doesn’t shatter the believability, it stifles it before it even gets a chance to take hold.

If it seems I hated the film, I didn’t. It saddens me. Like so much in art, it is not the terrible film that bothers me half as much as the great one that squandered its potential. King Kong may be a great blockbuster, but it is not a great film. It has moments of sublime wonder and majesty. And oddly enough, in a film with this much action, they are mostly found in moments of tranquility and charm as when Kong and Ann watch a sunset together or discover the joys of sliding on a frozen lake. There is beauty in this movie. And grace. And, of course, raw, unmitigated power. Kong charges through the streets of New York City like he does through the jungles of Skull Island—smashing everything in his formidable path, tossing both airplanes and dinosaurs like toys. This is not a reimagining, but a loving re-creation. On steroids. Sure, you’ve seen it before and you know what happens, but you haven’t seen it like this.

Jackson has no peer when it comes to this sort of super-sized, otherworldly, enchanting fantasy. But this film does something none of the Rings film did—it exhausts. While King Kong’s last moments are genuinely moving, there is, nonetheless, a palpable sense of relief that the excessive, bloated, shallow, and often illogical film is finally drawing to a close.

And that is a Kong sized tragedy.