KING KONG

KING KONG

          To begin with, the grand original King Kong , released in 1933, ranks high on my list of ace favorites; I may have seen it more times than any other film, and I have taught it as an outstanding example of horror film (monster variety) and a brilliant display of the sorts of special effects pioneered in Hollywood many decades ago.  Rich in thematic meaning and relevance, like so many films of its era it reflects some important truths about the condition of America and the world in the 1930s. 

          The Empire State Building, constructed in something like eleven months by workers who knew in those dark days of the Great Depression that they would be jobless once they finished, was completed in 1931; in 1933 King Kong climbed it, holding Fay Wray in his arms, regarding her, in Jack Kerouac’s words, with huge eyes of tender love.  The great ape, the lovely woman, the wonderful building created one of the most enduring and symbolic film images of that time or any time.  The beast in the jungle finally perished in the urban jungle of the big city, where his adventures on Manhattan Island closely echo those on Skull Island.  In a moment of absolute but quite wonderful corniness, Robert Armstrong utters his epitaph, “Beauty killed the Beast.”

And who could forget the lovely Fay Wray, the first and greatest of all the scream queens?  She developed her vocal cords and perfected her running style in The Most Dangerous Game, which prepared her for King Kong, where she also looked most desirable in the brief swimming scene, when she suffered a wardrobe malfunction and revealed a bit more than usual in those pre-Code days.  (The actual monster was only three feet, six inches tall, and was moved through painstaking stop motion photography; in the scenes where the ape holds her, she only occupies a huge hand on an arm that slid out on wheels.  Appropriately, she titled her autobiography On the Other Hand.)     

Although the new version, the sixth or seventh remake, cannot match the original, Kong: Skull Island displays the latest in computer generated images, showing just how far the art of cinematic special effects has developed.  Kong himself is massive, easily the largest of all the giant apes in all the giant ape movies, big enough to swat helicopters out of the sky, big enough to make waves like ocean surf in the island’s lake.  Like his ancestors, he battles a number of monsters, including a multi-tentacled water dweller, and vicious creatures that combine the lizard and the snake into a sort of dragon; as the scientist John Goodman) who leads the expedition says, Skull Island is a place that God didn’t finish.

Thanks to the wonders of contemporary cinema, those monsters surpass the dinosaurs, snakes, and pterodactyls of the original in sheer ugliness.  They include that octopus-like creature that rises out of the water, only to become a meal for Kong; a giant spider whose tree-like legs impale some of the crew; and worst of all, the horrifying reptilian beasts who pose the greatest threat to all the Skull Islanders and manage to munch on quite a few of the explorers.  Aside from their ferocity and their appetites, one of the most distressing results of encounters with the beasts is their propensity to vomit on their human antagonists and, worse, when disemboweled, to spill their viscera all over them (fortunately, no excrement).  Whatever they suffered, Fay Wray and Bruce Cabot never had to deal with those messes.

Set in the waning days of the Vietnam War, the movie also attempts some odd connections to the past, with a whole fleet of helicopter gunships ferrying the scientific expedition and a platoon of soldiers to Skull Island.  The script litters the action with coy allusions to Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness, including Hank Marlow (John C. Reilly), a slightly nutty pilot whose plane crashed on the island in World War II, combining references to both works.  With the help of some of the expedition survivors of several creature attacks, he completes work on a boat cannibalized from two planes that conveys the group toward the hope of safety, serving in effect as one of the heroes of the film.

On Skull Island Kong is more than a king, he is a god, who actually protects the indigenous people—a small, silent, colorfully painted and apparently kindly tribe—from the hideous animals seeking to devour them.  After losing a goodly number of their members, and over the objections of the war loving colonel (Samuel  L. Jackson) who leads the military contingent, the expedition comes to a grudging understanding of Kong’s importance to them and the island. 

The actors perform their roles serviceably if not with any particular distinction.  A fine actor generally, John Goodman appears tired and bored with his part and somewhat subdued when he becomes a monster’s repast.  Tim Hiddleston, who’s riding high these days (the cover of GQ means something after all), teams with Brie Larson in their versions of the Bruce Cabot-Fay Wray power couple, but contemporary underplaying somehow needs more of the original’s unabashed exaggeration and exuberance.  The new picture ranks as probably the best of all the many remakes and imitations, but nothing will completely replace that great original, which above all provides a rich thematic content, perhaps the most significant void in Kong: Skull Island.