Peter Jackson's Honorary Doctorate in Zoology

or

Rewriting Evolutionary Theory^*

I'm sitting down to write this an hour after seeing Peter Jackson's King Kong. I didn't like his Lord of the Rings, but that was because I'm a picky bastard who griped that they weren't exactly like the books.

I didn't like King Kong because it was a cinematic abomination. The car ride home from Corydon, where Benji and I saw the movie, takes about a half-hour. We spent the entire ride talking about how bad the movie was, and had no trouble continuing to find things that infuriated us.

The beginning of the film was dull, the characters flat and uninteresting. I had no reason to care about any of them--the only one to have any sort of depth was the lead woman, Ann Darrow, but absolutely nothing was done with it. This was a theme: they would do actions and scenes that would set the stage for a dramatic scene later, but do nothing with it. The film-maker, Carl Denham, was a two-bit sleaze who constantly swindled everyone in his attempt to strike it rich, but no-one ever really got mad at him for it. At one point the first mate of the ship talks about a cabin boy, Jim I think, saying that he was found as a stowaway on the ship, and was described as having been more savage than the caged lions and tigers on the ship. Nothing was done with that, either.

Other reviews talk about Jackson kicking the action into high gear by the second hour, described as "one of the greatest dizzying sprints in cinema history." It wasn't dizzying, nor exciting. It was boring. King Kong wasn't so much a movie as a two-hour chase scene with a set-up tacked on and cheesy dialogue stuffed in. The attacks from giant CG creatures were endless, obviously attempting to fill the movie with tension and drama, but did nothing but take up time that could have been used to add, say, a plot... interpersonal relationships... characterization.... As Benji said, Peter Jackson's meaning in making this film was, "I like making giant CG monsters."

The CG wasn't even all that good. Kong was impressive, sure, and I noticed several imperfections that made him more realistic: scars, bald spots, mats and crud in his fur, missing teeth, and a mangled ear. However, the other CG monsters weren't all that good. They looked funny and moved awkwardly. And I'm sure Jason could explain to me, in detail, just how badly they did Kong anyways.

But the worst part of this movie was that it made no freaking sense, either from an evolutionary, ecological, psychological, structural, ballistic or logical sense. Every creature on Skull Island was enormous, which leads to the obvious question of how their ecosystem works--what do they eat? Well, actually, Peter Jackson answers that... they eat people. And nothing else. Every animal in the movie is a pack animal, attacking their prey in huge droves--and their prey is always the tiny band of humans that manage to stumble onto the island. A handful of dinosaurs are seen hunting other dinosaurs, but when they catch sight of tasty human morsels, they immediately forget the enormous, already-slain carcass in their mouth to go after a tiny human that would be perhaps a mouthful. In fact, three Tyrannosaurs are so determined to get to Ann that they gang up on Kong, fighting him until they die in order to get this tasty little gum-drop. They're not trying to eat the giant monkey battling them, and they're not trying to survive by running away, they're only trying to get past Kong for that tasty, tasty human.

At one point, an endless swarm of giant things--cave crickets/roaches/arthropods of some sorts--are crawling over a band of humans who managed to survive crashing into a giant chasm that Kong threw them down, and the cabin boy Jim picks up a machine gun and manages to shoot them off without so much as nicking the person they were crawling atop. These creatures are but one species of endless swarming things, including bizarre enormous sea-urchin-like creatures, that crawl from the rock for minutes on end but don't attack each other. And yet an hour later, a single man (who has fallen desperately in love with Ann, a relationship that is never fleshed out) manages to trek through the jungle alone, at night, with neither backpack, nor food, nor weapon, nor light, and find the exact spot where Ann & Kong are sleeping without getting killed. At that point, however, they are attacked by swarms of giant bats that look like someone enlarged a bat's body and pasted the head of the Nosferatu onto them.

Early on, Kong crashes through the jungle with Ann in his paw, and yet miraculously manages neither to accidentally crush her, break her spine as he shakes her about like a rag doll, nor brain her against the endless branches. She doesn't even get cut. Kong gets bitten deeply several times by the Tyrannosaurs, without apparently being injured or even bothered, and is at one point shot by the party of men searching for Ann, and doesn't even notice. Yet a single harpoon gun in the leg that barely gets past his fur sends him howling in pain, and the guns of the planes manage to kill him at the end.

A group of savage natives kill a handful of people at the beginning, and then kidnap Ann and give her to Kong, but are never seen again... even when the crew are leading Kong back through their village. They manage to kidnap Ann by pole-vaulting across stones and onto the ship, steal the woman, and get dragged back to the shore by a rope without being dashed against the rocks. During the "sacrifice" scene, flaming liquid flows down an enormous stone wall built by people who wear bones and live in huts made of bundles of sticks. There is no volcano ever shown on the island, no reason to believe they have access to lava or any other kind of cascading, fiery water.

The boat that they take to the island is a small, dirty thing that doesn't seem to have enough room in it for many people. And yet they keep bringing extras (and even named characters!) onto the island to be killed by giant CG monstrosities. I was amazed that they had as many people on the boat as they managed to kill, and yet still had enough of a crew left to: fix a broken ship; rig it to be able to hold an enormous monkey (perhaps Kong didn't really weigh all that much, since he managed to leap on rooftops and walk across frozen ponds without breaking either); drag said enormous monkey onto the boat; and sail the boat back to New York. How they got the boat away from a place filled with fog and in which compasses go haywire is never explained, nor is it explained how they keep Kong docile and caged (and fed)--after they knock Kong out, they simply skip to the Broadway show where he breaks free.

And the (human) love interest for Ann, the play-write Jack Driscoll, was for some reason a super-writer. He was apparently a great athlete, a great shot, could drive a car backwards, quickly, through rush-hour traffic while evading Kong. This was done, by the way, to lure Kong away from the evacuated theater... and into other portions of the city that he probably wouldn't have been destroying otherwise. After they took Kong back to New York and everyone went their separate ways, Jack was regretting not telling Ann how he felt when he had the chance. What changed his mind was a play that he was watching... a play that he wrote. Normally one doesn't get epiphanies from things that one writes.

A complete lack of logic aside, the movie is claimed to be "jaw-dropping, eye-popping, heart-stopping"... and it's not. Oh, it attempts to be, but it fails. The end tries to be endearing, compassionate, heart-breaking, dramatic, and yet ends up trite. The final line, "It was Beauty that killed the Beast", is not the philosophical, inspiring quip that it aspires to be. The romance (both between Ann and Kong as well as between Ann and Jack) is handled in typical Hollywood fashion--two characters meet and both fall in love with each other for no reason at all. I'm sure we're supposed to feel bad for the ape's death, to feel that they're murdering a gentle giant who's been mistaken for a savage beast, but he is a savage beast. The movie makes it quite clear that he is a rampaging, murderous creature who kills everything around him except, for whatever reason, Ann herself (they state that seventeen people died trying to get him, which frankly seems like a very low estimation, and doesn't include the three Tyrannosaurs he messily killed).

I mentioned above that they simply skip the part where they load Kong onto the boat, returning to New York immediately. This skips what could have been the most dramatic and personal part of the movie--the betrayal Ann feels at Kong's treatment, how she leaves the crew, how Preston (Carl's assistant) finally gets fed up and abandons him, etc. But Peter Jackson wouldn't hear of giving his characters depth, not when he can have giant CG monsters attacking them for no reason!

This was the first time a movie was so bad that I seriously considered walking out in the middle of it. But then I would've missed the only good part of the movie: when Kong is rampaging through New York, chasing Jack's car, he finally smashes the car enough to knock Jack out and stop him. The front of the car is torn open, letting Kong see the unconscious Jack, and the beast is ready to kill him... and then he stops. The music changes, and Kong looks into the camera dolefully, apparently thinking: "Wait. If I kill him now... am I any better than they?"

*Thanks to Benji for the title