King Kong (2005)

Rating:*****

Director: Peter Jackson

Starring: Naomi Watts, Adrian Brody, Jack Black

Review: Peter Jackson’s epic remake of King Kong has two things going for it. One, it delivers some of the most exciting action sequences and special effects ever put on film. Imaginative, non-stop, terrifying adventure occupies more than an hour of the three-hour film. Two, it is the love story between a beautiful blonde and a giant, savage ape. And that, dear readers, is some fucked-up shit.

Let’s start with the films minor flaws and get them out of the way, because there’s no way these small weaknesses should dissuade you from seeing this movie on the big screen where it belongs.

Monkey* love — it’s just wrong. There, I said it. The idea that Naomi Watts can reach out and find the gentle side of a savage animal? Sure. That’s why Mowgli doesn’t get eaten in the first three minutes (or pages) of The Jungle Book. And while Jackson thankfully spares us the classic shot of the big gorilla feeling up the scantily clad blonde and then sniffing its fingers, there’s still a clear effort to make their relationship more than just a general PETA-approved kindness to animals thing. (Unless you agree with South Park on the nature of PETA’s love of animals).

There’s an unintentionally squirmy/hilarious bit where Watts’ more human love interest, Adrian Brody, catches girl with monkey at a tense moment. Closeup of giant ape looking longingly at girl. Closeup of girl looking achingly up at the gorilla. Closeup of Brody, horror dawning as he realizes he’s lost his girl to a giant, dinosaur-killing monkey. So either this moment of jealousy is insane on Brody’s part, or he’s right, and it’s just … ick.

Also wrong: Just like with the Lord of the Rings, Jackson takes forever to end this movie. I mean, seriously, after the battle on top of the Empire State Building, Kong gets a death scene that would make the biggest Shakespearean hack overfloweth with envie. That ape takes longer to die than Rob Schneider’s career. And when it does die (the gorilla — still waiting on Schneider’s career), Jackson has Jack Black and a random pedestrian explain to us, in no uncertain terms what the ape’s savage life and falsely noble death means — in case we missed it.

What’s right: Every other minute of this beautiful film. To call the emotionally seductive underpinning of the film “fairy-tale like” would give probably a wrong impression — this is not The Princess Bride. But Jackson uses character types that we immediately get — the plucky ingénue trying to make it in the hard world, the egomaniacal genius (Jack Black as an unscrupulous film director), the low-key, sensitive intellectual (Adrian Brody) and a host of others, from sea-hardened sailors to nebbish assistants.

Jackson’s camera is all over the place, pulling in close to give us beautifully lit close-ups that are as emotionally manipulative — in the good sense — as the constant, not-quite overbearing Hollywood Classic score by James Newton Howard. With all this, Jackson manages to get our heart rates up and our minds ready for the fantastic before he gets us to Skull Island, home of hideous, vicious natives, dinosaurs and insects the size of mid-sized luxury sedans.

We open in New York City in the 1930s — a gauzy memory of New York so viscerally right that it’s actually disturbing to see it in color, rather than in scratchy black and white of old newsreels. Jackson uses this opening New York sequence to hammer home a little too often the idea of his characters being helpless in the hands of fate, destiny or the unseen gods of cinema, but we forgive him.

The director sets up the characters: Naomi Watts is trying to make it as a vaudevillian performer, while the money-crunching suits at the studio are trying to derail Jack Black’s latest doomed vision for an over-budget fly-by-night film production. Black plays the obsessed Carl Denham, at about half his usual mania — meaning just over-the-top enough. When the studio pulls the plug on Black’s newest picture, he flees with cast (including the serendipitously drafted Watts, and the cunningly shanghaied Brody) and crew on a tramp steamer bound for “the last blank space on the map,” the possibly mythical Skull Island.

And once we’re there, we realize that the whole first hour and ten minutes of the film is like that pleasantly anticipatory creep up the first peak on the roller coaster, before that initial deep plunge that puts our hearts in our throat. There’s no point in trying to describe the madness. Sickening horrific natives more disturbing than the Reavers in Serenity, dinosaurs that have evolved way past Jurassic Park, and just the creepiest — and largest — bug life ever. Oh, and a giant freakin’ ape.

Whoever storyboarded this stuff — Jackson, no doubt, but perhaps others, too — should have temples raised in their honor. Smallish temples, but temples nonetheless. The action breaks into two tracks, splitting between “Naomi and the ape” and “Everyone Else.” So consuming is each sequence that when Jackson switches to the other group, I was a bit startled because I’d totally forgotten the other group existed. Every time. There’s not much more to say about that. Quibbles can be made, but shouldn’t be. It’s great stuff that sets a new bar for action-adventure.

Okay, one quibble. It’s always sunset or sunrise in this movie, sometimes moving from the former to the latter with no sense at all that about nine hours of darkness have passed. Around the fourth time this happens, it’s a little annoying.

The final sequence is the unveiling of the captured Kong in New York City — again made dazzlingly beautiful and convincing. There’s the biplanes vs. Kong on the Empire State Building, and because we somehow sympathize with the monkey, the movie lets him smash three of the planes but keeps their inevitable fatal crashes off-screen. By the way, we have a giant, utterly savage monster rampaging through Manhattan, throwing cars across city blocks. Of course it has to be killed. But Watts can’t bear it. Then the monkey dies. And dies. And dies some more. With his rival out of the way, Adrian Brody finally gets the girl, and Jack Black tells us what the film was about. Lights up, roll the lovely Art Deco credits.

In the end, the film is a triumph for Jackson. The implied bestiality he inherited from the original, and the fact that his film keeps ending, and ending, and ending isn’t a surprise at this point. It’s like complaining that an Oliver Stone movie is a polemic. Well, duh. I’ve got no witty closing line here. Just go see this movie.

* This review interchanges “monkey” and “ape” for comic effect and out of complete indifference to zoological categorization. You really don’t want to be the kind of person who puts a pedantic correction of this “error” on the comments page.