This was the biggest movie in the world (for about 15 minutes). For a very small amount of time everyone was talking about King Kong, everyone had seen the movie (or at least they claim to)
And according to the internet it was the world's most expensive film.
I have a perceived memory in my head of how this film worked but now I'm wondering if it's being influenced by the original King Kong movie which I'd only watched a few years previous. I do remember there being a tribal Society who worshipped King Kong. And they're just as racially stereotyped as they were back in 1931. How's that for progress.
At the time the CGI held up fairly well. It didn't look dated at all. I'm sure that won't change.
Oh and Jack Black was in this for some reason.
Post viewing:
It's official, The Simpsons Halloween Special is still the best adaptation of the original King Kong movie.
Everyone must know the story of King Kong at this point. Even if you've never seen a movie with him in it. I mean what's not to get?
You have this guy in New York trying to make a nature documentary. And he's having a really hard time because there's no money for him. But he also has this strange treasure map that tells him of Untold Adventure and he thinks he can make a mint off of this if he can only get there. So he has to trick a camera crew, a boat crew and one really unlucky girl into going on a voyage to some unknown location to find god-knows-what.
Eventually they'll make it to the strange Island end up in countering a group of savage natives who will kidnap the girl and offer her to the giant monkey as a sacrifice. The monkey will take the girl. But instead of eating her or crushing her or doing whatever it is a giant monkey would do. He decides to keep her like some over sized Barbie doll.
A couple of people decide to go searching for her. One is a person she's romantically involved with and the other one is the man who wants to make the film documentary. Only one of these people really gives a darn about saving her the other one just wants to get a bunch of good footage. Now in the case of Jack Black he eventually ends up losing his film and decides to go with a secondary plan. To capture the Kong monster himself.
Eventually they'll catch King Kong and bring him back to America to parade him in a giant Broadway show. The monkey will escape, grab the girl he was infatuated with to begin with and travel to the top of the Empire State Building where he meets his untimely demise and dies.
Now overall I think Peter Jackson's King Kong is okay. Yes the CGI Graphics are a little dated but not to the extent that you're so jaded by the difference between them in the real life people that you just can't take it seriously. And the aesthetic of the film is fantastic. It really feels like it exist in the same world as the original King Kong. The ending scene or calling is on top of the Empire State Building is it almost shot-for-shot Recreation of the original.
Skull Island looks really good. We get to spend a lot of time there and actually explore the surrounding areas. Seeing not only King Kong but giant bugs and various dinosaurs. Some of which I'm sure was inspired more by Jurassic Park.
But then it might be hypocritical to mock the new King Kong for utilising dinosaurs from an older film when the original King Kong was most likely inspired by The Lost World from 1925. Kind of ironic that these films should come out of the same time apart from one another.
The real problems with this movie come from a lack of character development and stagnating scenes. At 3 hours long it's a little overbearing. You'd think with such a long-running time that we'd be able to see some character development. Like say the writer (Adrien Brody) at the beginning of the movie growing as a person and becoming more courageous inevitably becoming the hero of the film.
But he doesn't do that. He just goes from being kind of timed to Action Man in the span of about 20 minutes. His romance with the leading lady is also kind of undeveloped. The two of them just fall in love while they're on the boat in the first 30 minutes of the film. There's no character interaction between the two and they don't really learn to like one another over time. And it's not like we couldn't have had that scene. They're on a boat leaving New York and heading for an island that would be off the coast of Sumatra.
That's a trip from New York down the coast line passed Florida (possibly past Cuba) going into the Panama Canal coming out the other side and travelling through the Pacific Ocean all the way to Indonesia. Assuming they didn't go around past Alaska down through Japan to get to Indonesia and then off the coast of that country into unexplored Waters. That's an unfathomable amount of time. That's a couple of months at least.
And we don't get to see any of these people interacting with each other. Or at least not much. We get a little Montage but that's not enough to convince me that these people should truly love one another.
and a fair amount of the scenes could be cut down. Some could be removed from the film all together without harming the overall flow. And a lot of the interaction between Naomi Watts and King Kong could have easily been cut down.
There must be four different scenes were Watts in King Kong or just sitting together doing random things. I think we're supposed to be seeing a weird bonding moment. But at the end of the day I just can't get why Watts character is supposed to like the ape. It's just a Mindless creature to her. Yes it shows her a little bit of compassion but you really shouldn't have consumed your whole life with the creature after it was captured. It almost feels like some off form of Stockholm syndrome. Which really it's not but the film wants you to think it is.
The action scenes or the movie really shines. Rather it be King Kong fighting the T-Rexes or the human characters having to deal with giant spiders and other mystical creatures. The whole thing has a very Lord of the Rings vibe to it which shouldn't be surprising given that it's made by the same people. There's even a few moments were Jack Black's character is trying to smack a bunch of spiders with a rifle and all I could think to myself was Samwise gamgee and his frying pan of Destruction.
It's a spectacle film. Something you want to see the Grandeur of a giant ape and the giants 1930s world that he happens to inherit.
The characters and even the story itself are kind of secondary to the overall display of the movie.
And to be honest, I'm fine with that. King Kong is not some form of ''high'' art that existed before the age of motion pictures. It wasn't adapted from a book, play comic, or some God forbidden TV show. It was made for the cinema. So it only seems right that it should be appreciated from a visual standpoint.
No matter the flaws the movie may possess it still does its main objective right. Recreate the world of King Kong. And it's one of my absolute favourites.
King Kong symbolises the Last Vestige of the old adventure story. From the days of HG Wells and Jules Verne's. Of adventure, conquest and personal discovery. Of learning and compassion, and the drive to push Humanity ever forward into unknown territory, both physically and mentally.
And then to take that newly discovered ''Savage Nirvana'' and bring a little piece of it back to the modern day. Only to watch as a clashes with our world. As an ultimately rips itself free of our constraints and then is destroyed and Bash down by our technological prowess.
We get the added bonus of that modern-day being the 1930s. The beginning of the True Modern Age*.
The early 1930s is something of a golden age in my mind. It's a time of great technological advancement when skyscrapers started to dominate the sky and that old Wild West Frontier America was all the dead. This was the beginning of what is modern America a time of Industry wealth High living and extreme decadence. But it exists before the age of the 1940s. When we still had biplanes and simplified military technology. A Great Depression made everything stagnant and dirty. And there was this horrible contrast between the immensely rich and the ridiculously poor.
Or maybe I'm just blabbering on about all this and really I'm just looking for a fancy way to say; ''I like art deco.''
Nitpick moment:
Every King Kong movie has that one scene where the people knock King Kong out and then transport them to America. And a little part of me always wonders; ''How the hell do they do it?''
You look at the situation where the people are on Skull Island. They're working on a skeleton crew because so many of their members are dead. The other ones are exhausted, a lot of the food is gone.
And in a few of the adaptations much of the ship's cargo is gone to. As it's either been tossed overboard or physically tossed to lessen the weight of the ship. But then they somehow put this 15 ton gorilla onto the boat and sail it all the way back to America!
Then somehow they have to keep the gorilla subdued and Alive while on their trip all the way back on top of the other 15 problems they already have. It's a pretty big issue.
But here's the funny thing. It doesn't matter. We don't need to know how the monkey got back to New York or how they kept it to do the whole time. Or even how they subdued the darn thing. We only need know that it's there.
One of the best things about the King Kong movie is knowing which details to keep in and which ones to throw away. What's interesting to the audience? The monkey itself.
Everyone wants to see that big monkey climbing up the world's tallest building and fighting against a bunch of planes in the sky. They don't want to see 30 minutes of debating how to deal with the monkey and then how to transport it back to the new world. Because none of that really matters. It doesn't affect the story at all. It doesn't add anything to an already existing Adventure. It just bogs things down and makes a story that's already pretty long even longer.
So the next time you see a ''gap of logic'' in a film. Think to yourself, does this thing I'm complaining about need to be in the film? What did adding it do to the overall experience?
*Hyper opinionated thought. I personally always looked at the early 30s in late twenties is the true beginning of our most modern age. Time when most of us at least in the more developed world had access to electricity and halfway decent Medical Aid. A time where a lot of the modern technological advancements were starting to be seen even by the most basic of people. Personally I think the basic Modern Age begins somewhere during the Italian Renaissance. When we started questioning our old feudal ways of living and progressing ourselves into a whole new way of existing. What your personal stance is on the Modern Age could vary drastically from my own. Some people believe the Modern Age started in 1995 when the internet (started to) became prominent in people's lives.
The characters and even the story itself are kind of secondary to the overall display of the movie.
And to be honest, I'm fine with that. King Kong is not some form of ''high'' art that existed before the age of motion pictures. It wasn't adapted from a book, play comic, or some God forbidden TV show. It was made for the cinema. So it only seems right that it should be appreciated from a visual standpoint.
No matter the flaws the movie may possess it still does its main objective right. Recreate the world of King Kong. And it's one of my absolute favourites.
King Kong symbolises the Last Vestige of the old adventure story. From the days of HG Wells and Jules Verne's. Of adventure, conquest and personal discovery. Of learning and compassion, and the drive to push Humanity ever forward into unknown territory, both physically and mentally.
And then to take that newly discovered ''Savage Nirvana'' and bring a little piece of it back to the modern day. Only to watch as a clashes with our world. As an ultimately rips itself free of our constraints and then is destroyed and Bash down by our technological prowess.
We get the added bonus of that modern-day being the 1930s. The beginning of the True Modern Age*.
The early 1930s is something of a golden age in my mind. It's a time of great technological advancement when skyscrapers started to dominate the sky and that old Wild West Frontier America was all the dead. This was the beginning of what is modern America a time of Industry wealth High living and extreme decadence. But it exists before the age of the 1940s. When we still had biplanes and simplified military technology. A Great Depression made everything stagnant and dirty. And there was this horrible contrast between the immensely rich and the ridiculously poor.
Or maybe I'm just blabbering on about all this and really I'm just looking for a fancy way to say; ''I like art deco.''
Nitpick moment:
Every King Kong movie has that one scene where the people knock King Kong out and then transport them to America. And a little part of me always wonders; ''How the hell do they do it?''
You look at the situation where the people are on Skull Island. They're working on a skeleton crew because so many of their members are dead. The other ones are exhausted, a lot of the food is gone.
And in a few of the adaptations much of the ship's cargo is gone to. As it's either been tossed overboard or physically tossed to lessen the weight of the ship. But then they somehow put this 15 ton gorilla onto the boat and sail it all the way back to America!
Then somehow they have to keep the gorilla subdued and Alive while on their trip all the way back on top of the other 15 problems they already have. It's a pretty big issue.
But here's the funny thing. It doesn't matter. We don't need to know how the monkey got back to New York or how they kept it to do the whole time. Or even how they subdued the darn thing. We only need know that it's there.
One of the best things about the King Kong movie is knowing which details to keep in and which ones to throw away. What's interesting to the audience? The monkey itself.
Everyone wants to see that big monkey climbing up the world's tallest building and fighting against a bunch of planes in the sky. They don't want to see 30 minutes of debating how to deal with the monkey and then how to transport it back to the new world. Because none of that really matters. It doesn't affect the story at all. It doesn't add anything to an already existing Adventure. It just bogs things down and makes a story that's already pretty long even longer.
So the next time you see a ''gap of logic'' in a film. Think to yourself, does this thing I'm complaining about need to be in the film? What did adding it do to the overall experience?
*Hyper opinionated thought. I personally always looked at the early 30s in late twenties is the true beginning of our most modern age. Time when most of us at least in the more developed world had access to electricity and halfway decent Medical Aid. A time where a lot of the modern technological advancements were starting to be seen even by the most basic of people. Personally I think the basic Modern Age begins somewhere during the Italian Renaissance. When we started questioning our old feudal ways of living and progressing ourselves into a whole new way of existing. What your personal stance is on the Modern Age could vary drastically from my own. Some people believe the Modern Age started in 1995 when the internet (started to) became prominent in people's lives.
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