Long Live the King

People love going to the movies, but they love watching their favorite TV shows too. That's because they begin to like the people in the show, and it no longer becomes about what happens, plotwise, in the show, but what happens to these people. Thus, shows like Friends or Seinfeld are popular, because people genuinely like the characters in the show.

Given the nature of serial shows which can have upwards of twenty five episodes a season, lasting years, even decades, the people become a part of your family, albeit a dysfunctional family.

Films, on the other hand, have much less time to introduce characters, and must often make the decision to focus on characters or focus on plot. Characters become archetypes or ideas, more pure, more intense. If plot or action is important, it becomes the overriding force that pushes the narrative forward, at the expense of character development.

Peter Jackson has two things that pull him. He wants to have action in his film, grand set pieces where spectacles never seen are splashed on the screen. However, the savvy filmmaker he is, he knows that all the action doesn't matter if you don't have characters to care about.

Jackson sets the bar of difficulty high when he remakes King Kong. This is at least the third film incarnation of the film, from the stop motion original back in the 30s(?), to the one from the mid 70s, to his version. Remakes often have a lot to live up to, though remaking a monster movie is often much easier to improve. At least, it's not a remake of Casablanca or Gone With The Wind, classics that few would consider remaking.

But Kong is even inherently challenging. This is, fundamentally, the story of a woman and an oversized ape. It is beauty and the beast writ large. But can you make it believable? I kept imagining this story of some family that wanted to have a birthday party for their pet monkey, and that in the company of other monkeys, this monkey went wild and bit the master.

To be fair, Kong isn't a real ape, though Jackson takes pains that he is not a human/ape who has sexual longings for Ann Darrow, but treats her more as a favorite plaything, trying to remove more of the anthro from the anthropomorphizing of animals.

But is Ann a real person? She has as much background and history as Kong. An out of luck vaudeville actress, she just seeks a man in her life. So what if that man happens to be an ape. He's the strong, silent type, who'll protect her, no matter what. Dig too deeply, and you realize that there's something not all there with Ann, and that's the rest of her life.

Not that the other characters fare much better. Jack Driscoll, the writer, is just a writer who happens to fall in love with Ann. But he's not much more than that. He mostly chases Ann around, and that pretty much sums up his character. A man who will stop at nothing to save Ann. He's the human equivalent of Kong, except he can't kill dinosaurs, and he can write stories, even plays that serve as his own advice.

The closest person that resembles a character, and barely at that, is Carl Denham, who ends up being the stand-in, of sorts, to Peter Jackson, and any director who's long suffered to bring his vision to the world. Oddly enough, I wanted Jack Black to make his performance more over-the-top. Although he talks about being rich and famous, money seems to be the least of his worries. It's all about making movies.

If Kong succeeds, it's in its visual spectacle. Cinescope gives you an extreme width for a height, and shows off the jungle, and the view of New York City to great effect. Kong looks fantastic.

And while the three hours pretty much flew by, ultimately, the film is handcuffed by its underlying story, which is the story of a woman and ape, which didn't quite grab me as I thought it should have. Even the ending, where Jack climbs the building (through more modern means) to meet Ann feels like a letdown. Why would she give up Kong for the playwright (albeit, now a dead Kong).

And I had imagined, as Kong was falling, floor after floor, that somehow, the WETA guys would have him looking gleefully mad, mouthing "My Precious".