‘Kong’ isn’t king, but it’s close

Part of the draw of the original “King Kong” is the way the film honestly believed with all of its heart that Kong was indeed the eighth wonder of the world, as the characters so often called him. It was an epic moment in film, one that we’re still feeling today. Peter Jackson, nerdish film director and number one fan of “King Kong,” operates his own remake with the same dynamic, though perhaps with a more self-conscious slant than the original. And for the most part, it works, because it successfully expands the original film’s ideas without vulgarizing them.

In particular, Jackson has taken one of the film’s primary concepts (“‘Twas beauty killed the beast”) and pushed it into overdrive. The relationship between Kong and leading lady Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) has become something tragic in a Shakespearean sense; the unspoken love between these two will be forever impossible to understand, simply because their two worlds are destined to be incompatible.

Unfortunately, the film’s greatest improvement becomes a convenient metaphor for its greatest folly. Indeed, the worlds of Kong and humankind are so dissimilar that it seems they can barely share the same movie. The film spends an inordinate amount of time setting up depression-era New York. Sure, it’s a flawless recreation of the era, what with the classic cars and fedoras as far as the eye can see but compared to the looming icon that is Kong, such detailed treatment of human civilization appears a little trite. Jackson, apparently drunk on the power given to him by the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, is still stuck on “epic” mode; he seems to force himself to stretch out that first hour before we meet Kong.

Nevertheless, the film is meant to be a spectacle, and a spectacle it becomes once the motley film crew that serves as our heroes—Ann Darrow, madman film director Carl Denham (Jack Black) and down-on-his-luck screenwriter Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody)—reach Skull Island. Kong appears soon thereafter, and suddenly all is right with the world. But when he’s put into action—climbing the Empire State Building or battling three tyrannosaurs at once—it’s, simply put... awesome. Perhaps that sounds like something out of a 13-year-old boy, but it’s precisely what “King Kong” wants out of its audience: an awed reaction to bring out the little kid in its viewers, to force them to recall the first time they laid eyes on a movie screen and realized just how big it was.

Jack Black gives his best (and most restrained) performance to date, playing Denham as an Orson Welles-esque impresario, an intriguingly single-minded role that may be a sly commentary on passionate filmmakers in general—including Jackson. Meanwhile, Adrien Brody, sad-eyed and humble, possesses a unique, everyday quality (even in scenes of action), yet somehow manages to avoid the stale Everyman-called-into-battle feeling, as so many forgettable cinematic heroes end up. However, Naomi Watts’ appeal continues to escape me—her dumbfounded eyes-agape gaze generally fails to portray an irresistible siren. Luckily, the performance distinguishes itself when it’s important: namely, a key scene when Ann stands up to Kong after he tries to bounce her around like an inferior plaything.

And that aspect is truly what makes “King Kong” a worthwhile experience—a portrayal of burgeoning humanity in an inhuman world. A wonder of intelligent discovery surrounds Kong’s scenes, a feeling of immeasurable understanding when he realizes that he has been roughly denied by someone weaker than he, and, eventually, that brute strength alone cannot win over his love. One must be left to wonder how human Kong is, from his opening scenes to his ending scenes.

I’ll demur when words like “four stars” and “top ten” start getting thrown around “King Kong,” but its unbridled enthusiasm for its influences, and movies in general, cannot be so readily ignored. Perhaps it is only guilty of high aspirations; Jackson introduces a world that promises to be so overwhelmingly spectacular that, no matter what, we were all bound to be a little disappointed to realize that it was still made by a human being, bound to suffer its share of missteps. But it must be said that “King Kong” has a preternatural understanding of its larger-than-life world; it is not a great film, but greatness abounds in it.