Top movie.

The original (1933 King Kong) is probably the classic monster movie, and I’m guessing that you know the plot already. (Ape meets girl; empressario ships ape to New York; ape carries girl to top of Empire State Building; girl loses ape.) So watching this film is a bit like watching Titanic, or The Empire Strikes Back: you know that the ship sinks and that Luke’s dad is the one with the breathing difficulties… but, in a way, that just adds an extra dimension of tragedy. You know that Kong is doomed, and Peter Jackson knows that you know. And you know that he knows that you know, and that only makes it more poignant.

Other good bits: Kong fighting, well, everything. Peter Jackson’s version of Kong’s home, Skull Island, is crammed to the gunnels with dangerous creatures. Acre for acre its wildlife is about 18000 times more dangerous than that of even Australia. Snakes? It has enormous komodo dragon things. Crocs? It has dinosaurs. Poisonous spiders? Pah! Skull Island laughs in the face of your poisonous spiders! Skull Island’s Brobdingnagian* cockroaches, spiders and huge, nameless, toothy, phallic, head-eating worm monsters frankly would have Steve Irwin crying for his mummy.

The giant bugs scene was apparently cut from the original 1933 film (for being too gruesome, according to the IMDB). Unfortunately, for me, the gross-out nightmarishness of that one scene threatened to overwhelm my experience of the rest of the movie. Ugh! Giant toothed penis monsters!

The bugs scene, and others, like the one with the stampeding Brontosauruses†, are, frankly, over-the-top. Watching about a dozen people running between the legs of a hoard of stampeding Brontosaurs, along a gully, then a crumbling cliff-edge, while also being set upon by ravenous velociraptor‡ things, with only a couple of people dying, just tore up my credulity and threw it on the floor and unsuspended by disbelief and dropped it next to my credulity. Just silly. Exciting to watch, in a colourful spectacle way, but silly.

(It’s like the prehistoric equivalent of watching Tom Cruise being thrown from an exploding helicopter to the side of a speeding bullet train in Mission: Impossible without being instantly killed. Except that King Kong is otherwise a good film, whereas Mission: Impossible is shit.)

Our panel of reviewers was even reduced to laughter by the endless barrage of dangers through which Ann Darrow (the Fay Wray character, played here beautifully by Naomi Watts) is thrust. No sooner does she escape the komodo dragon things, then runs from oversized millipedes, than she is set upon by 3 tyranosauruses then falls down an enormous ravine (pursued by the 3 T. Rex), then has to perform vaudaville for a giant ape. Almost the definition of ‘about as shitty a day as you can get.’

Fortunately these snatches of nonsense aren’t enough to condemn King Kong. The performances are lovely—especially from Watts and from Andy Serkis as the titular Kong. (Some reviewers have criticised Serkis’s cameo human rôle, as Lumpty The Cook. It’s a daft, salty-sea-dog of a performance, perhaps a little hammy, but decent.) The performance of Kong, in particular, is enough to justify this remake. What couldn’t be done in terms of expressiveness with a stop-motion gorilla in 1930 is very doable with millions of dollars of CGI and sympathetic animators.

In fact it’s generally well-cast. Jack Black is excellent as Carl Denning, the conniving rogue empressario, Adrien Brody is a beautifully understated hero, and the supporting cast is great too.

The third act of the movie, where Kong rampages through New York—the crux of the whole film—is awe-inspiring and heartbreaking. —Like much of the rest of the film, it should have been edited more ruthlessly, but it’s beautifully filmed. If you’re not crying by the finalé then you have no soul. Or no tear ducts.

Really my only (main) criticism of King Kong is the running time. It shouldn’t have been 3 hours long; the DVD Director’s Cut Special Edition can be 3 hours long, but the theatrical release should have had an hour, and some of that high-octange silliness, lopped off it. Having said that, it doesn’t actually get boring. Just that, by the time Kong is climbing the Empire State Building you’ve lost feeling in your bum.

Kong lives, Kong breaths, Kong steals your sympathy, and Kong breaks your heart.

Go and see it.

*Yes, I used the word ‘Brobdingnagian’. Yes, it is pretentious.
†What used to be called ‘Brontosaurus’ is now called ‘Apatosaurus’, doncha know. (It’s to do with the rules of taxonomic naming, whereby the two groups of species were found to be essentially the same, and ‘Apatosaurus’ had been named first.) Shame. Brontosaurus—“Thunder Lizard”—is such a great name. But anyway, King Kong is set in the 1930’s, with big, old-fashioned, lumbering dinosaurs—none of your Jurassic Park revisionist warm-bloodedness, so the things with the long necks cannot be anything other than Brontosauruses.
‡Deinonychus, probably. Less famous than velociraptor, but bigger and scarier. Or Utahraptor maybe. Whatever.