King Kong (2005)

Rating – 2.5/4

**SPOILERS**

Let me start by saying I’m really not sure why I watched this. I just wanted to watch the 1933 original and be done with Big Monkey. Then I thought “that was alright, but I kinda want to see the one with better effects” (aka effects that aren’t 90 years old. Granted they were great for their time). Then I saw that Peter Jackson made a 3 hour long remake of a movie that was about half that runtime. At first I thought I’d just skip the bits without Kong, but then I just got kinda lazy. 

So here I am. Having now sat through the entirety of a 3 hour King Kong movie. So what have I gained from this?

Well, I can now confidently say that a monster movie does not need to be 3 hours. This was very unnecessary. Peter Jackson clearly wanted to add more meaning to the film by emphasizing its ideas of exploitation and connection between Kong and the woman he falls for. It’s also clear that he wanted to do more with the original’s set pieces, taking advantage of evolved special effects to create something more spectacular than the original’s impressive if dated stop motion. I’d say he succeeded. But like. He also could’ve done this in 2 hours. 

The tale of King Kong is a simple one, with enough of a legacy to be familiar to most audiences. A struggling actress in the middle of the Great Depression joins a film crew to an uncharted island, where the natives attempt to sacrifice her to a 25 foot tall gorilla named Kong, who is immediately taken with her beauty. Following a rescue mission and several encounters with prehistoric creatures, Kong is captured and brought to New York, where he is put on stage as entertainment, before breaking free and eventually being killed trying to find the woman he fell for. It’s a classic story, all easily captured in 90-100 minutes in the 30s. So how did Peter Jackson double that runtime?

The 2005 version of this story is loaded with subplots, extraneous characters, and scenes that mostly don’t go anywhere. I can list so many examples. Carl Denham, the film’s director who grows obsessed with capturing Kong (and is distractingly played by Jack Black), is given plenty of screen time struggling to get funding for his next film, getting into legal trouble, and keeping the nature of the film’s location and his intentions hidden from the crew. Yes, this establishes him as a bit of a scumbag, but it pads the runtime. Repeatedly lying to the crew doesn’t do much to change the outcome of the story, the legal and money trouble ultimately goes nowhere, and I feel it would add more of that extra meaning Jackson was going for if he was a more simple character explicitly motivated by greed. He’s not wasting time trying to save his career, you can cut out conflicts by making the crew as greedy as him, etc. It would simplify the story enough to cut down a good chunk of the runtime, but also not take away from the story being told. 

On top of this, extraneous characters. The boat taking the crew to Skull Island (home of Kong. The whole island they’re going to. I don’t know if that needed clearing up, but it’s the first time I’ve mentioned the name, so might as well be safe) has a first mate named Mr. Haynes, who has an apprentice named Jimmy, and there’s this long subplot where Jimmy wants to do things but Haynes doesn’t want him in danger but he keeps on doing dangerous things and so on so forth you’ve seen this sort of thing before. No points for guessing that Haynes gets killed by Kong; you can see it coming a mile away. It’s one thing to have this entire separate subplot, but nothing comes of it. Jimmy gets no emotional payoff to avenge Haynes. In fact he’s not even in the third act. There aren’t any clear themes tying this into anything. My best guess is these characters were created so there could be more named characters, so they have some personality that people can get invested in. The story here is pretty cliche, so I don’t think it worked. And also, it adds more time onto a 3 hour movie. We just didn’t need this. 

All of my rambling aside, I do actually have a point to make here. We really don’t see blockbusters like this often. It’s not the most controversial thing to say that a lot of big budget studio tentpoles frequently lack distinct identity, and hop on trends or copy styles to appeal to the widest audience possible. Of course, this has always been true of studio filmmaking, especially in this age of corporate mandated sequels and CGI fests. What I find distinct about King Kong is that Peter Jackson was clearly allowed full creative freedom. No one stopped him from making this thing 3 hours, and adding all the subplots he wanted, and dragging scenes out for way too long (that’s another thing. This movie desperately needed a tighter edit). In 2005, Jackson was fresh off of getting a couple billion dollars and a truck load of Oscar’s for his Lord Of The Rings adaptation. I can only assume that due to his success, no one was willing to say no to his ideas. It results in an oddly fascinating movie, in which a filmmaker is let free of the reins and is able to give into every impulse he has, good or bad. Jackson can just make every scene as long as he wants (often to the point of tedium), he can throw in essentially a horror movie scene with giant insects, no one will stop him from pausing Kong’s rampage in New York so he can slide around on a frozen pond (That’s a real scene and it’s as bizarre as it sounds). It’s a freedom filmmakers are rarely granted in blockbuster filmmaking, allowing King Kong to be, in its overlong way, an oddly unique viewing experience. 

I do want to take a moment to appreciate parts of this movie. Jackson has an eye for spectacle, and it is thrilling watching Kong fight 3 dinosaurs at once, the finale on top of the Empire State Building is a thrilling (if overlong) upgrade from 1933, and the fight against the giant insects is delightfully disturbing (a nice nod to Jackson’s origins as a horror director). And it’s so clear this movie was made with pure love for the original. There’s a number of references I greatly enjoyed (especially after seeing the original the night before), such as the production displaying Kong mirroring the old sacrifice scene, and the film crew in the movie shooting a scene directly lifted from the original. Jackson cited the 1933 movie as a reason as to why he became a filmmaker, and the result is an undeniable labor of love that remains charming in spite of the movie’s flaws. When this movie works, it really works, and I’m not sure I’ll see something quite like it again. I just don’t think it's worth the 3 hours. I would love to see a shorter cut however, and if that were to happen, I’d probably recommend it.