King Kong (***1/2)

 Beauty and the Beast meets Jurassic Park in Peter Jackson’s remake that brilliantly updates the special effects while retaining the essence of the 1933 story.

I guess I’m in the minority who thought Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy pretentious and overlong. (Heavenly Creatures, his 1994 psychodrama is to me his masterpiece, and this comes close.) Though featuring the same screenwriting trio (including Jackson) as LOTR, Jackson’s remake feels altogether less serious, and that’s all to the good. For those who missed the 1933 classic, it’s the story of a New York City filmmaker (Jack Black) who hopes to shoot on an uncharted island that turns out to be inhabited by a huge ape. (The ill-regarded 1976 version made it an oil company that goes there.)

The epic (at 187 minutes nearly twice as long as the 1933 version) divides into three parts. There’s the part before they get to the island, mostly the tale of Black’s character, P.T. Barnum crossed with Cecil B. DeMille. He cajoles, lies, and bribes to get his leading lady (Naomi Watts), his writer (Adrian Brody), and the ship’s crew to do his bidding. Then there’s the longest section, the tale of beauty meeting beast on some sort of freak Galapagos island. (The black “savages” present in the earlier versions are there too, though they disappear as soon as they’re no longer necessary to the plot.) About an hour is pretty much an orgy of CGI effects at least the equal of Jurassic Park, of which you might be reminded.

Finally, there’s the climax back in Gotham, the tale of tragic romance. The smitten Kong, enraptured by Watts, spurns other women (“spurns” in this context meaning “flings to certain death”) and wreaks general havoc. He says, “I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of a beast and a girl don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Okay, he doesn’t say that, and, as tales of problematic romances go, it’s not Casablanca, but is in its way touching. “We’ll always have Skull Island,” his computerized face seems to say. The decision to retain the 1930s setting (unlike the 1976 version) is wise, as it retains overtones of an old adventure film, and the story would be less believable set later on.

IMDb link

circulated via email 12/22/05 and posted online 9/20/13