I was, and I remain, one of the few people on this earth willing to state for the record that I thought the 2005 Peter Jackson version of King Kong was terrific. Indeed, I’ve long been of the opinion that most people who have condemned that picture didn’t actually see it. It’s long and self-indulgent, yes; but it’s staggering as a piece of cinematic craft—with an absolutely gorgeous recreation of Depression-era New York City. The middle section, on the South Seas island where natives and prehistoric creatures interact with a giant gorilla, has a knockout series of chilling sequences. It flags toward the end, with Kong in the Big Apple, but all in all it’s an achievement.
Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy had triumphed both with critics and audiences, so he was ripe for a takedown, and taken down he certainly was. To this day, people think it was a massive flop when, in fact, it was a modest success (only modest, in part because it was the most expensive movie ever made up to that time). His elevation to Spielberg/Lucas status was canceled, and then he went off and made three movies out of a single 300-page novel called The Hobbit. So the hell with him.
What’s even more shocking, perhaps, is that I had the same favorable opinion about the 1976 version of King Kong with Jeff Bridges, Charles Grodin, and an unknown blonde named Jessica Lange. (Think about that cast. Amazing.) It takes the form of a screwball comedy, in which Grodin and Bridges seem to be contesting for Lange—only to be replaced in her potential affections by the big gorilla she meets in a jungle. Like Jackson’s movie, this Dino De Laurentiis (remember him?) production was insanely expensive and was universally deemed overproduced, especially because De Laurentiis built a 40-foot model of Kong and placed it in the plaza of the newly built World Trade Center.
It was the South Tower that Kong climbed with Lange in his paw in 1976 rather than the Empire State Building, as had been the case with the 1933 original, so the movie might have an unintentionally disturbing resonance today.
To be honest, I liked both later Kongs far more than the 1933 flick (which I saw several times as a kid because it was an RKO picture and RKO owned Channel 9 in New York City, so it showed King Kong on the Million Dollar Movie at least once a month). I understand that this 1933 classic practically invented the special-effects picture, but even as a kid I found it clunky and wooden and the incredibly painstaking stop-motion effects silly rather than transporting.
To say that you don’t think much of the original but love the lambasted remakes is to commit heresy against cinematic sentimentality. So burn me at the stake.
Which brings us to Kong: Skull Island, the latest in what will evidently be a centuries-long history of insanely expensive reboots. This one cost $185 million, about a third cheaper than Jackson’s but almost double the De Laurentiis version if you take account of inflation. I think I’ve established that if Kong: Skull Island were good, I would have no problem saying so. But it isn’t good.
For one thing, Kong has somehow gone from being 40 feet high to 100 feet high, evidently so he can battle Godzilla in a sequel. (This is not a joke.) So when he first encounters this movie’s Fay Wray—played by Brie Larson, who has followed up her Oscar with a performance very dependent on the fact that the T-shirt she is wearing is three sizes too small for her—he’s basically 295 feet taller than she. This means that it’s not even clear how Kong can see her, much less develop a crush on her.
Then, when a demented Vietnam-era colonel played by Samuel L. Jackson announces that he and his men are going to kill the beast, even this conservative hater of the film Platoon figured they really ought to frag him right on the spot. But they don’t—so they die, of course, which is some kind of metaphor for the Vietnam war. I’m not sure what kind of metaphor, to tell you the truth, and neither is Kong: Skull Island—which is understandable, since its 32-year-old director, Jordan Vogt-Roberts, was minus-9 when the last helicopter lifted off the Saigon embassy grounds in April 1975.
In short (get it?), rather than bother with this one, if you simply have to see a picture about a very large and misunderstood gorilla right now, give Jackson’s movie a try, or De Laurentiis’s. Or let it go. After all, these are movies about a large and misunderstood gorilla. Surely you have something better to do with your time.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
