XDA

Went to the new version of King Kong yesterday afternoon and liked it a lot. I can do some nit-picking, as I am wont to do, but I'll hold off for a while. It's long, 3 hours and 7 minutes, but never really drags, especially after they get to Skull Island. Let's do some comparison with the 1933 version. In the original, Skull Island has a big mountain that looks like a skull (a natural rock formation) but it also has a nice beach with palm trees and a native population that looks West African in origin (how they got to the middle of the Pacific is anyone's guess) and that population is healthy and thriving (there are babies and fat ones and they have outrigger canoes so they can leave the island and fish). There also is a big wall in good repair with sound wooden doors. It's not that unpleasant a place, at least on the side of the wall where the natives live.

The new Skull Island is a freaking scary place. It's rockbound--no palm trees next to a gently sloping beach. Everything is hardscrabble, barren rock, shot through with ruins ancient and rotten. There are skulls everywhere (but no big rock formation on the mountain, so guess where the island's name comes from). The natives, who look largely Melanesian with some southern Indian (India Indian) are freakshows. They have large bone piercings and the filed teeth cannibals have (now we know where the skulls are coming from) and they are in poor health. There is nothing growing on their side of the wall (although there are fish hanging from the omnipresent but otherwise purposeless bamboo poles). It looks like a rough place to scratch out a living and these guys are barely hanging on. I'm instantly reminded of Easter Island (Rapa Nui) where Polynesians thrived, ruined the ecosystem and crashed into cannibalism. They didn't have any boats to get off the island either. I'm not sure they were the world champion pole vaulter like the new scary natives were though.

So the natives are there, with no boats, a crumbling wall, only fish and humans to eat and an ape religion (left over from the ancients--notice all the old carvings in ape motif) which requires them to sacrifice regularly their most comely women folk (shudder) to a giant ape who proceeds to pull them apart. No wonder they're so mean. Even the pretty little girl they first encounter doesn't want the freaking chocolate and bites the hand that tries to feed her. They instantly fall on the film makers, dispatching one with a spear through the chest and another ceremonially with a sharkteeth encrusted war club, and our heroes and heroin are saved only because the German captain of the tramp steamer is German to the core and comes in the nick of time shooting his P-08 Lugar into the body of the native executioner. The crew is armed also with the Mauser 98s (with the straight bolt handle) and about 30 Thompson sub-machine guns (1928A-1s with 100 round drum magazines) the captain keeps under his bunk. The black first mate has a 1911 Colt but is unable to make good use of it. Despite the weapons, the filmmakers are not out of the woods by a long shot even after the armed rescue and they have to be rescued again, from giant arthropods and other invertebrates.

In the 1933 version, Kong kills most of the surviving crew coming to rescue Ms. Darrow by throwing them, on a big log, into a deep ravine. They filmed what happened to the guys at bottom of the ravine by creepy crawly horrors but when they screened it, it was just too frightening and they cut it and destroyed the footage (at least no one has ever shown me any stills). The only thing that survived from that part is the back-legless, toothy thing crawling up a vine that nearly gets Jack Driscoll as he's hiding from Kong in a shallow cave below where the giant log had been.

There is no such restraint by director Peter Jackson in the new version and what happens at the bottom of the ravine just goes on and on in ways certain to give many young children nightmares for the remainder of their childhood. It's pretty good, but what a horror. The worst were the giant gastropod/tube worms that consume poor Andy Serkis whole. I might have nightmares about them. OK, some nitpicking. In the Pamplona running of the sauropods scene, it is highly unlikely that humans can run alongside 20 or so galloping brontosaur-like dinosaurs and survive. It is equally unlikely that eyes closed, anyone could use a Thompson to shoot giant chiggers off a thrashing human body. So unlikely were these two scenes, that the whole movie was hurt by my inability to suspend my disbelief here. Also, what's with the long fanged, giant bats? Large bats in the real world eat fruit and the carnivorous or blood sucking ones are tiny. What were these supposed to prey on, Kong's family? Just silly. OK, nit-picking mode off.

Except for the three talons on the upper limbs (should have been two) the Tyrannosaurs were extraordinary. The difference from the Willis O'Brien version 72 years agio is that these have no lips, just big honking teeth (too big) and a giant maw. I can't praise these scenes too highly; this is what movie making can sometimes be about; showing us realistic visions that before only existed, and only could exist, in our minds. Fantastic in every mode of meaning of that word.

I like that the Broadway show Kong becomes is a pretty accurate recreation of the native scenes in the 1933 version, including the coconut shell bras. I like the inside jokes regarding the original version. I liked that Kong recognized Jack Driscoll and comes after him at a gallop. I like the tophat symbol on the biplanes that come to get Kong (it is a U. S. Navy squadron that still exists) and the unshrouded Lewis guns on swivels for the back seat gunners. Heck, I liked almost everything. The movie is a technical triumph, an intense adventure, a fair to middling human drama and a must see. And I swear that there were plenty of people in the theater crying when Kong gets shot. Plenty. When's the last time you cried for a computer projection? King Kong may not be heaven, but it gives you every dime of your money's worth.