Love is King

You're not like other men I've dated: Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) shares a peaceful moment with Mr. Kong in Peter Jackson's King Kong. Courtesy Weta Digital Ltd./Universal Pictures.

When I was a boy, my parents took me to see a series of horror movies that seared my pre-pubescent consciousness. Call it tough love or misguided child-rearing but Jaws, The Swarm and Alien taught me a lot about fear. A matinee viewing of 1976’s King Kong, however, was a much different experience. While occasionally frightening (I was too young to recognize its camp value), that movie provided lessons in star-crossed love, compassion and hubris. Jessica Lange was a babe, the monster sympathetic. It was weirdly erotic. I took the ending very hard.

Those same emotions came flooding back while watching Peter Jackson’s remarkable remake. Jackson hasn’t remade my youthful touchstone, but rather the original King Kong, his favourite childhood film. The Oscar-winning director has done what often seems impossible in contemporary studio filmmaking: he’s super-sized a beloved classic in every way. Jackson’s King Kong is twice the length of the 1933 picture, pumped up with the most sophisticated of 21st-century special effects while still managing to preserve the intimacy and magic of the original.

The 1976 version set its story in the modern day, but Jackson returns to Kong’s Depression-era roots. A filmmaker named Carl Denham (Jack Black, sporting an Orson Welles-style ’do and comparable girth) journeys from New York to the South Seas, guided only by a mysterious map and his own egomania. On the lam from his studio bosses, he intends to make a movie on Skull Island, a location as legendary as Atlantis, if infinitely more treacherous. Denham’s shipmates consist of his screenwriter, Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), a vain matinee idol (Kyle Chandler), a down-and-out vaudeville actress named Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) and an ornery crew of seamen. Darrow, smarter than she looks, is smitten with the screenwriter, who, in one of Jackson’s many wry jokes about filmmaking, is relegated to one of the animal cages kept in the ship’s hold.

Darrow and Driscoll’s romance is cut short by their arrival at the fog-enshrouded Skull Island. Denham is ecstatic. After the ship runs aground, he leaps onto shore, camera on his shoulder as the crew reluctantly tags along. What follows will be familiar to King Kong buffs. The interlopers are attacked by marauding natives (a truly frightening, wall-eyed bunch) and Ann is kidnapped and offered as a sacrifice to the island’s 25-foot-tall ape god. But King Kong takes a shining to the blonde. After spiriting Ann back to his cliffside home, he begins his awkward seduction, alternately trying to impress her with brute strength and cradling her in his furry breast. Ann, for her part, is soon charmed by the big lug — who, we learn, has a soft spot for sunsets and long walks in the park.

You disrespectin' my girl?: Kong defends Ann Darrow from a tetchy T. Rex in the jungles of Skull Island. Courtesy Weta Digital Ltd./Universal Pictures.

But Kong’s not the only beast on Skull Island. The place teems with ferocious creatures, both prehistoric and fantastic. When Denham and his crew attempt to rescue Ann — the filmmaker, of course, is more concerned with his picture than with the girl — the crew is beset by dinosaurs and head-sucking water worms. Bugs as big as Hyundais descend. Kong himself must defend Ann against a trio of T. rexes, and their escalating 20-minute battle unfolds like a series of thunderous cliffhangers. It’s a tour de force of action filmmaking, constantly inventive, thrilling, exhausting and shockingly realistic in spite of the fact that you’re watching a gigantic ape kick a dinosaur’s ass.

Much of the credit for this authenticity must go to Andy Serkis, who “plays” Kong. Familiar to Lord of the Rings fans as the face of Gollum, Serkis studied gorillas for two months, perfecting a series of facial expressions that were mapped onto Kong’s face through digital animation. Serkis’s Kong is a complex creature, shifting effortlessly from fury to friskiness. The humans in the film do an admirable job (even if Black seems occasionally miscast), but Kong is definitely the king of this jungle.

When the ape is captured and taken back to New York, he is chained to a Broadway stage and reduced to a sideshow freak (“The Eighth Wonder of the World”). Awed audiences laugh and recoil, but Kong’s desire for Ann is unstoppable, and he soon bursts from the theatre in mad pursuit. Jackson’s New York is a stylized, fairy-tale metropolis, awash in glittery snow and Christmas lights, but Kong doesn’t stop to sightsee. Automobiles and pedestrians are crushed like pop cans. Searching the streets for his lady love, the sad simian picks up and casts aside a series of blondes more quickly than a Hollywood Lothario. When Kong and Ann are finally reunited, they enjoy a brief idyll in Central Park that might be the year’s most romantic movie moment.

The story’s conclusion is well known to its fans, and Jackson remains faithful to the poignant end. The famed Empire State Building climax is rendered with a surprising sensitivity. Much more than high-priced mimicry, Jackson's highly personal film imbues the legend with an appropriately tragic grace.

King Kong opens Dec. 14 across Canada.

Jason McBride is a Toronto-based writer and editor.

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