King Kong

(Peter Jackson, USA, 2005)

Suitably for a project in which size matters so profoundly, the first striking thing one notices about Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong is its tendency towards inflation.

Where the original 1933 film barely scraped 100 minutes, this one strides boldly for over three hours. And where the original, directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, created an elegant and ingenious two-part structure, Jackson stretches the plot events to fit the three acts deemed essential for any contemporary blockbuster.

Jackson's attitude to the original film – a true classic which has lost none of its storytelling or artistic power – is hugely reverential (as the final dedication shows). The story is, for the most part, identical: an expedition, led by an adventure-obsessed filmmaker, Carl Denham (Jack Black), lands at Skull Island, home of the giant, savage ape, King Kong (Andy Sirkis). Kong claims as his companion the film production's leading lady, Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts). Once subdued, Kong is ignominiously put on display, until he breaks free and rampages through Manhattan.

The casting of Ann and the ship voyage, economically sketched in a few scenes in the 1933 film, are here stretched to form Act 1. There are more characters to keep track of: the male hero (of the human species, at any rate) is split into the sharp-shooting Captain Englehorn (Thomas Kretchsmann) and the dreamy writer Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody); while young Jimmy (Jamie Bell) gets lessons in appreciating Conrad's Heart of Darkness – enabling the obligatory, superficial nod to Apocalypse Now (1979) – from his elder, Choy (Lobo Chan). Male bonding abounds in this movie.

Act 2 – which looks suspiciously juiced up to provide fodder for the simultaneously released "official video game" – is comprised of a series of hair-raising battles and chases on Skull Island. These action scenes show off Jackson's admirable ability to marry the chaos of the Michael Bay style with the clarity of the Walter Hill or William Friedkin style. Curiously, one extravagant chase featuring tumbling dinosaurs in a crowded ravine, in its unavoidable actors-running-before-a-blue-screen unreality, is the only one to revive the peculiar and intoxicating oneirism of Willis O'Brien's special effects in the original (as Claude Ollier so well described it in 1965: "Stippled space and stippled time, gaps, fringes, overlaps and incompatibilities in action, zones of imponderable duration, void, into which apprehensions of unreality tumble headlong.")

Act 3 in Manhattan is surprisingly to-the-point. The remake here loses some of the most striking rhymes of the original's mirroring structure – such as Kong's ability to pick out a human victim's body from an isolated forest grove inverted into his impotent scaling of a skyscraper, tormented by the deceptive hell of the modern noir city and its omnipresent seriality of both sights and sounds – but Jackson saves his best moments of Beauty and the Beast pathos for this finale.

Did he really have to keep, however, the rather nonsensical final line ("'Twas beauty killed the beast" – but hardly in the reassuring fairy tale sense that the beast is reborn as human!) that, in the phantasmic economy of early '30s horror (a cycle analysed so perceptively by Thierry Kuntzel via Freaks [1932] and The Most Dangerous Game [1932]), served merely as a pretext, a cover, a screen for what was truly churning under the film's surface? Here, Jackson once again betrays his skin-deep appreciation of his source – and his weakness for a facile read-out of the Big Theme.

Jackson's King Kong is a paradoxical object in that, while presenting itself as an extravagant homage to the original film, it skirts or suppresses much of what made that movie an enduring classic. Indeed, Jackson's interpretation is surprisingly conventional, and much more old-fashioned than what Cooper and Schoedsack unleashed upon the world.

At moments, Jackson's playing safe is understandable. Wishing to avoid the potentially racist implications of recycling the original film's fulsome depiction of a primitive native tribe, this version of King Kong offers only a handful of Skull Island inhabitants as creepy zombies or spirits who vanish almost as soon as they appear.

Likewise, in a defensible attempt to give the plot a little more flow and realism than it had in 1933, Jackson excludes the strange on-deck rehearsal scene in which Fay Wray screamed for Denham's camera – substituting, instead, more normal movie scenes featuring Ann and her preening leading man, Bruce Baxter (Kyle Chandler), another new character.

This cut, however, is symptomatic of Jackson's conservative approach to the material. The 1933 film is constructed entirely on uncanny rhymes across the two halves of the film, effects of mirroring and reversal that give the story its depth. Jackson, it seems, has no need for the very modern self-consciousness, the alienation effect that came from seeing Wray scream for real only after having already seen her fake the very same emotion.

There are even more profound losses in the translation of Kong from 1933 to today. By minimising the indigenous population of Skull Island, Jackson may avoid racism – but he also excludes the bitter political point of the original, that the adventurers and entrepreneurs from a white, Western world effectively unleash a chaos that destroys the social, ecological and cultural order of a far older civilisation. (Hence the meaninglessness, in this voided context, of the Conrad reference.)

Jackson's Kong is also, rather remarkably, a creature entirely deprived of libido. (I remain unconvinced that Jackson intended Kong as a good-father figure for Ann – thus positing Bad Dad Denham and Oedipal successor Jack.) A notorious scene in the original shows the mighty ape gleefully peeling off a layer of Wray's clothes and then smelling his fingers. For seventy years, fans of a Surrealist persuasion have allowed the intoxicating imagery devised by Cooper and Schoedsack to fuel their wildest and most perverse imaginings. Jackson's version is high on scenes of violence (brilliantly executed by the special effects department) but terribly coy when it comes to this sexual component of Kong's tale.

Although the 1976 version, starring Jessica Lange and solidly directed by John Guillermin, is frequently derided, at least it had the courage to update the story to a contemporary situation (the oil crisis) and to associate the heroine with a modern, permissive sexuality that promised to be a match for Kong's own gargantuan lust – not to mention the now chilling prescience in swapping the Empire State for the Twin Towers as the site of Kong's last stand.

Setting aside these comparisons with previous versions, what does the new King Kong offer in its own right? Alongside the evident technical excellence and superb lead performance by Watts (who projects at once vulnerability and strength), Jackson spins some intriguing, new motifs.

Retaining the Depression era setting of the original, the film kicks off by comparing the animals locked in zoo cages with the downtrodden victims of economic woe – and counterpointing that dual misery with the desperate escapism offered by popular culture.

Jackson builds the development of the story (co-scripted with his regular collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens) upon strong threshold moments: Ann's first step onto the ship, or the crew's initial, fog-covered glimpse of Skull Island. Later, he makes the most from repeating and varying dramatic points of interruption, in which fleeting experiences of bliss are always snatched away from the protagonists and from us: the first kiss between Ann and Jack, or the lingering, empathetic looks between Ann and Kong (this latter example, however, is repeated so many times as to recall the never-ending ending of his Lord of the Rings trilogy).

What does the King himself stand for in 2005? No longer a symbol of oppressed peoples or a talisman for the Freudian unconscious, Kong is now rather more like the Cinderella Man recently incarnated by Russell Crowe: a figure of wounded masculine pride, cut down by malign forces of history.

In the final scene, it is the sight of this beast standing erect and pounding his chest that registers more deeply than his familiar gestures of climbing the highest available spire or clutching his girl. As a psychological character, Kong is very much the figure of a guy who must learn to counter his egocentric childishness (such as when he waves Ann around like a rag doll) with the discovery of his sensitive side.

In the most curious motif of the film (added by Jackson to the original), Ann teaches Kong to appreciate beauty – not her own feminine beauty, but the splendour of a sunset. As he faces extinction amidst a nasty, brutish modern world (an odd echo of the final moments of The Proposition [2005]!), this Kong seems to be driven neither by animal lust nor sublime love.

All he really wants is a friend.

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© Adrian Martin December 2005