william_miller

Is this a perfect movie?

No. Is it damn close? No. But what it is happens to be far and away the most magical bit of cinema to come along this year, encapsulating what was really the theme in Hollywood for 2005, "Fear And Love".

If you don't know the story, it's this: Director with no leading lady and a map acquisitions a boat and finds that leading lady. Amassed people go to island, in hopes of making a film. Dinosaurs, tribal natives, and a giant monkey are already there. Natives sacrifice leading lady, giant monkey steals lady and falls in love. The rest of the amassed go, many die, heroic male saves the lady, director knocks out giant monkey. Director sets up monkey as big show, monkey escapes, wreaks havoc, finds lady, climbs up high, gets shot down, and beauty kills the beast. That's it in one sparse paragraph. Not very exciting that way, but that's what made the 1933 version so great: the style of the way the story was told bumped it up quite a few notches into being a great brilliant piece of work, a classic.

And I do believe that's what Peter Jackson, as big a fan of '33 Kong as is humanly possible, did with Kong 2005. He produced a work that, while sometimes off-putting in the pacing and quite often well over-the-top, is as loving and tender to its source point -- Jackson's tears as he watched the stop-motion Kong fall from the Empire State Building -- that it's nothing but breathtaking.

The quibbles shall come first, before I explain to you the amazement. Most critics have complained of the first hour and how slow it is to get us to Skull Island, home of the continuing Paleological Period. I personally had more problems with the second hour or so, where the involvement with the natives doesn't stick and where the Brontosaurus chase is perhaps the most unnerviing action sequence in the film -- you wonder if all the scenes will be this over-the-top, with such a jokey ending (a bronto pileup that stretches over 30 seconds, and plays like the most ancient Chaplin gag ever). Peter pulls away from it very quickly afterwards, definitely a good thing.

What wasn't a good thing was keeping so much of the Evan Parke/Jamie Bell scenes alive and in the film. Perhaps the most one-dimensional mentor/apprentice/father/son style relationship in recent times, neither actor really is able to overcome what is really kind of tweed-rag dialogue in a silk-sewn script. I give them effort for trying, though.

Those are my big problems. Most everything else I was happy with. Naomi Watts? Perfection. She inhabited Ann Darrow like she was born as Ann, grew up as Ann, had her first period as Ann... she falls right into the character, and never looks back. Perhaps that inspired Jack Black to pump up his Carl Denham character, nicely turned from the heroic and almost-sweet man of the '33 piece into a dark and twisted failure of human dignity, a guy more worried about film than about life; as Adrien Brody's Jack Driscoll (given actual character development here by Jackson, wife Fran Walsh and friend Phillipa Boyens as a playwright friend of Denham's rather than a tough ol' sailor) says, "That's the thing about Carl; he ends up destroying the things he loves most."

It's obvious that Peter loves Kong; and he ends up destroying Kong. There are some amazing sequences in this film -- the fight between Kong and the Rexes, where he has to toss Ann from hand to foot to hand, biting and throwing hard slaps and fists across the reptilian hides of his opponents, becomes a harrowing adventure movie in itself -- filled with more twists and near-escapes than I think the first two Mission: Impossibles had. And the capture of Kong is much more heart-wrenching, to me at least, than Mel Gibson's flaying of Jesus in The Passion.

It's in New York, though, where Peter truly turns it on. Instead of a few things being destroyed, it feels like half of the damn city's been ripped apart by the time Kong is through with it. And, in a nice twist away from the original's plot, Ann comes to Kong.

And that's where you may begin to cry. For the rest of the movie, excluding a sweet scene in Central Park and one last sunrise for Kong and Ann, is the downhill fall of the beast. He spends his strength, loses his blood, fighting to keep Ann safe. Andy Serkis and WETA Digital will have made you believe in Kong long before this point; but here, you truly do feel for him, knowing that he'll do anything for her. And when the bullets are nearly finished piercing him, and he looks down at his favorite blonde, believing he's failed to protect that which he cares about most -- it's over. At least for me. I broke down a bit at that point, knowing that soon he would slide off, lifeless and broken.

It's an astounding achievement, Kong. How many two movies can make you feel the same way when they were released 72 years apart? How many remakes end up standing up to their forefathered film? I know it's not many. And I know that Peter Jackson's King Kong is one of those few.