In Peter Jackson’s Return of the King, there was a spectacular scene in which the elf Legolas single-handedly takes out a giant war elephant, first dispatching the entire crew riding its back, then firing a couple of arrows into its skull. Finally, with cool aplomb, he slides down the dying beast’s trunk, looking like a skateboarder doing a simple skid. He isn’t just a superlative shot with a bow, he has a semi-automatic bow and arrow and can take out entire platoons and mega-monsters without breaking a sweat.
I hate that scene.
It represents the worst of fanboy juvenilia—the hero inflated to god-like status, his actions no longer tethered by mere physics but become an exercise in supernatural wish fulfillment. It’s how comic book series die; not by closure of a good story, but by the steady pumping up of the central character until it becomes so central to the meaning of the entire universe that the only conflict is between the demiurge’s desires and the believability of the story’s reality. It’s damned boring stuff.
Peter Jackson showed some painful signs of susceptibility to that fanboy disease in the Lord of the Rings, and now having seen King Kong, I can say that he almost ruins the whole movie with ridiculous excess. Almost. There’s a great movie in the beginning and end of the story, and a ridiculous Dungeons & Dragons monster hunt with an indulgent Dungeon Master in the middle. The ending was so good I walked out of the theater feeling terrific about the whole show, but after thinking about it, there was an awful lot of crap going down through most of the movie.
A good science fiction story usually postulates one important novelty, and explores how that difference from the real world ramifies and causes complex consequences. There’s a wonderful, simple story in King Kong: that amazing giant ape, the interactions between him and a girl, and the disastrous collision with civilization. It’s Tarzan rewritten as a tragedy. That part is beautifully done in the movie, and Kong is a sympathetic and heroic figure, while Anne Darrow is empathy personified. That story works well.
Unfortunately, in the middle, Jackson translates a childhood fondness for the original King Kong into a kiddie cartoon. The whole Skull Island scenario is a botch.
He had to bring in the whole old bone-in-the-nose naked racism of the original; he did a great job of reveling in the wholly cruel and brutal savagery of a strangely prolific people somehow living on the rocky barren edge of an island full of monsters, in a stony city whose most common architectural features are the bones and corpses of its inhabitants. It made no sense, and was a distraction from the Kong story.
These entirely unsympathetic people are terrifying and murderous, and have the useful property of vanishing completely when the good guys fire a few guns. They are a caricature and a plot device, easily plucked off the game board whenever their presence might hamper the introduction of a new monster. They are also too easily dismissed. There is an entire city of these people, the small team of good guys have walked right into their midst, and have been completely surprised…they should have been dead. But no, the deus ex machine gun, which appears several times on Skull Island, makes the awkwardness of a massacre vanish.
“They should be dead” is a thought that ran through my mind several times. When they encounter the dinosaurs (which I thought were great, if unrealistic—they had the look of old-time Charles Knight illustrations, and their movements were beautifully slithery), they first get involved in an absurd stampede in a narrow defile. Everyone should have been dead, but instead credibility is strained overmuch with people darting in and out between legs and dancing along the edges of crumbling cliffs and bouncing off of and between and out from under tons of rubbery flesh.
There is a scene with giant bugs and some very cool sluglike beasties that were a cross between a giant leech and a chaetognath (heads full of spines, everting probosces, etc.—I want to go on record for having said “These guys have a lot of potential to be great horror movie stars” way back when. Peter, have your lawyer call my lawyer, we’ll talk). Once again, with a whole island full of giant hungry invertebrates, everyone should have been dead. But no, some survive, conveniently. (By the way, normal-sized fanged and envenomed invertebrates would have been just as lethal and scary, and far less prone to being trivially blown away with a gun.)
Once we were at the scene with the T. rex trapeze artists, my suspension of disbelief was gone completely. Laws of physics don’t matter anymore, all that mattered was how many giant flesh eaters could be squeezed onto the screen at once, and how many incredible positions and actions the CGI could render. Everyone should have been dead—people, flying and bouncing dinosaurs, gnawed-upon giant ape. Anne Darrow’s neck should have been snapped over and over again as she was tossed about like a rag doll.
The entire Skull Island sequence was like an overdone Warner Bros. cartoon, with cartoon physics, irrelevant consequences, and random rescues. It got in the way of the story. I think Jackson got so carried away with the horror monster special effects that he probably threw away most of the human parts of the tale, too…for instance, whatever happened with that subthread of James, the kid with the troubled past who was reading Heart of Darkness? Dropped and chopped to make room for more pointless creature wrestling, no doubt.
You know, Jackson could have simplified this part of the story. Forget the ghastly primitive natives; have the island contain only abandoned ruins. Drop the stupid battles between the people and dinosaurs and giant slugs; keep a few of the fights between Kong and T. rex (but having him fight 3 at a time was a bit much), since that’s part of the character’s development as an embattled loner. The capture of Kong was well done, I thought, as were the scenes with Anne and Kong, but everything with the crew and Wandering Monsters was a waste of screen time. Except, maybe, for hardcore geek fanboys.
Still, though, the last act of the movie was magnificent. It switched focus to Kong and the girl, where all the talent was any way, and although we all knew exactly what was going to happen, it was still wrenchingly done. Kong’s final torture was heartbreaking (Passion of the Ape, anyone?). The big gorilla’s character as a tragic figure was vivid, and saved the whole movie from being little more than a gussied up Friday night Sci-Fi Channel creature feature. It’s just too bad Jackson didn’t think on a slightly smaller scale for the rest.
