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A mammoth success

Director Peter Jackson, a reverent fan of the original King Kong, has captured the feel of the 1933 classic in an amazing remake.

By STEVE PERSALL
Published December 13, 2005

[Universal Studios]

Ann Darrow, played by Naomi Watts, shares a quiet moment at sunrise with Kong atop the Empire State Building in the remake of the 1933 classic.

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There's no need to wonder anymore about how audiences felt in 1933 when King Kong first rampaged across the screen. Director Peter Jackson has achieved the impossible, perfecting perfection with a remake making every other movie adventure seem positively Jurassic.

This must be the awe shared by moviegoers 72 years ago when this classic tale of a girl and her ape thundered into theaters. Just when we think we've seen everything modern cinema technology can offer - much of it in his Lord of the Rings trilogy - Jackson shoves the medium into a new realm. His King Kong, which opens in some theaters just after midnight tonight, marks the rebirth of a legend and the creation of a new standard in manufactured fantasy.

Simply amazing, although simplicity has nothing to do with Jackson's boyhood joy turned action masterpiece. The Academy Award-winning filmmaker says watching King Kong on television as a youth inspired his career. He returns that favor through a remake gilded with deep respect even as it digitally surpasses the stop-motion puppetry of the original.

Now the puppetry at Jackson's disposal is motion-capture, with myriad sensors attached to actor Andy Serkis, transposing his mimicry of ape movement into a computer-generated "skin." You will believe such a 25-foot creature exists, and that he's capable of emotions and reactions worthy of a silent film star. Serkis pulled this duty for Jackson before, as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films, and he's becoming something like a 21st century Lon Chaney, the man of a thousand bodies.

All this and dinosaurs, too. Not to mention the creepy crawlers, precarious situations and buzzing biplanes slapped from the skies over the Empire State Building. Jackson vividly reimagines things created by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack for the original, by doing what couldn't be done in 1933. Only a brontosaurus stampede feels bloated and isn't quite seamless with its human interaction. Only a cynic would complain.

But King Kong isn't, and never has been, entirely about the thrills. At its core is the best kind of love story, when the parties involved can't have each other. The reasons Kong and aspiring actor Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) can't be together are obvious. Yet their longing is based on compassion and amusement rather than the bestial urge suggested in the original and camped up in 1976's regrettable remake.

Ann's desperate life in Depression-era New York leads to an angle that's often overlooked: The original King Kong was also a feeding-hand gnawing of the filmmaking process. Jack Black plays Carl Denham, a creator of hokey jungle movies needing a star before the studio shuts down his latest off-the-cuff production. The character has always been laced with the irony of commerce and art, something Jackson nudges further as audiences have become wiser to Hollywood politics.

"You can trust me," Carl tells Ann in his hiring pitch. "I'm a movie producer." And the knowing joke that wasn't clear in 1933 isn't lost on audiences today.

Carl's latest project calls for a trip to barely charted Skull Island, where an ancient culture built magnificent walls for an unknown reason. But the culture isn't extinct and the reason will become known, although not for more than an hour. Waiting for Kong so long is a tease Jackson mostly fills with inside jokes, eye-popping set design and Black's perfectly cast brand of hucksterism, a sharp contrast to Watts' convincing innocence.

Nearly doubling the original's running time allows Jackson to expand characters in the first hour, pile on the creatures in the second, and turn the final act, when Kong races through Manhattan, into the marathon it always deserved to be. Any doubts about sitting through a three-hour movie can be set aside; this one feels only as long as its predecessor, since time flies when you're having so much fun.

Remaking King Kong allows Jackson to update a few things about the 1933 version for modern sensibilities. Ann isn't merely a skirt being chased by man and beast, but a woman of pride and pluck bristling just enough at being underestimated to remain true to the male-dominated era. Watts screams like a champ but also dreams as we expect from women in film.

The natives of Skull Island weren't considered embarrassing African stereotypes in 1933 but are in more enlightened times. Jackson makes them zombie aborigines of undetermined race under ritualistic mud makeup. He does re-create the original's Umgawa look for Carl's garish Broadway presentation of Kong. By then we know how misguided he and those images are.

Kong himself has been criticized through the decades as a racist nightmare: the black, beastly male leering at and pursuing the blond white woman. The fondling of Fay Wray and Jessica Lange in previous versions kept that debate rolling. Jackson sidesteps it by keeping everything platonic between Ann and Kong, no flashing of skin or probing fingers, just two souls connecting. She makes him laugh, so to speak, and he makes her feel protected, exactly what they each need, as it should be regardless of race or species.

Viewers won't have time to consider such things, anyway. King Kong is too relentlessly entertaining to wonder about anything except how Jackson will top himself next. It's spectacle with enormous heart, the result of a gifted filmmaker's gratitude for the source of his vision. If you look closely at the original Kong, you can literally see the sculptors' thumbprints on the ape's clay physique, pressing each tiny detail into astounding reality. Jackson's fingerprints are all over this one, another glorious return of a king.

Grade: A

King Kong

Director: Peter Jackson

Cast: Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann, Andy Serkis, Jamie Bell, Kyle Chandler, Colin Hanks

Screenplay: Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, based on a story by Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace

Rating: PG-13; violence, profanity, scary images

Running time: 187 min.

[Last modified December 12, 2005, 15:42:06]