King Kong

I've just finished watching the original King Kong from 1933, and now it's official. I hate this movie. I hated both remakes, the endless Peter Jackson homage to nostalgia and CGI, and the 70s version with Jessica Lange and Jeff Bridges with an evil oil company plundering skull island. Three attempts at the same iconic story by three directors in three different eras, and I've been sitting here trying to figure out why I find it all so tedious.

First off, I hate monkeys. I just think they're annoying, misshapen little creatures who glorify playing with your own feces and screeching, neither of which is something I approve of. I can't help but think this hindered my enjoyment of a series of films whose entire raison d'etre seems to be making people squeal "OMG look at the giant monkey!" A movie based on showcasing some grand, cutting edge special effects spectacle always ages incredibly badly, with the classic example being ID4 where "OMG look at the exploding White House!" wore thin before the movie was even out of theaters. And all of these movies feature long, long sequences of the giant monkey doing stuff for us to marvel at. In the case of the original, I kept thinking this must have looked really cool back in the 30's, but the thing looks so much like the Bumble from Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer it's completely comical now.

Maybe it's the whole story about a powerful savage being civilized by the sight of a blonde woman, only to have Our Aryan Hero keep stealing her back, capturing Kong and transporting him back to America on a boat in chains, taking a magnificent force of nature and turning it into an immobile sideshow attraction in a theater. There's so much material there ripe for exploration, so many themes to build a story on, and instead they give us "OMG look at the giant monkey!" I'm not asking for a deep exploration of colonialism or the vanishing wild, but seriously, the human story of King Kong, how Ann Darrow is changed by her experience with Kong, is nonexistent in the original, and since abruptly ends at Kong's death, there's a really abrupt, dour conclusion to that poorly explored subplot, implying Ann Darrow finally makes a meaningful connection to another living thing and but then it dies so she lives out her meaningless life in a loveless marriage making babies for the guy who kept coming to drag her away. This is the problem with it being a giant monkey movie, any real theme, like the obvious metaphor of the heartless oil company raping the earth in the 70's remake, gets a real halfhearted treatment.

Peter Jackson's version goes the way of all nostalgia fests, in that proudly magnifies all the fondly remembered flaws, and is too afraid to really commit to any of its innovations. It's disappointing, because he wasn't afraid to make Lord of the Rings into a story that would work on film and add and subtract material and characters, and add as many endings as necessary, but there's a timidity towards finishing anything he starts exploring here besides the endless restored spider-pit sequence (aka OMG look at the giant slugs!). The preciosity of trying to nostalgically recreate the film style of the period, which really boils down to Jack Black running around belting lines out to the back row and doing jazz hands, is also something I find unbelievably irritating. And after two and a half hours, the "I am Peter Jackson and you will marvel at my terrifying CGI dinosaurs!" sequences get as uninspiring as they did in the Jurassic Park sequels. King Kong... it doesn't matter what version you see, unless you have some sort of unnatural interest in giant monkeys, they all suck.