Wednesday, March 29, 2006
The King, The Kong
We just watched King Kong, the movie that lets us channel the monkey in ourselves. Okay, gorilla. It is quite a production: 3 hours, a cast of, hmm, dozens, and some very nifty special effects. I think the Hobbit-Movie-Guy was the director. You have to give it to Netflix. We reserved the movie a week before it was to be released on the 28th and it arrived on the 28th.
The movie could have been so much more. It felt as though the different divisions that produced the movie: the sound guy, the camera guy, the director, the actors, the animators — they must not have talked at all. The movie had a disconnected, muffled, unrealized feeling. The biggest problem was the undeveloped plot. They added nothing to the basic story. A beginning that was thirty minutes too long didn’t help; some imaginary exploration of the characters from an ironic viewpoint would have made the movie something contemporary, something smart. Likable, funny Jack Black was badly miscast. All the chances missed.
The most human character was the big chimp, who did an excellent job. The best sequence was a remarkable animation of run-from-the-monster involving a heap of Brontosauruses and that strange bird-like predator lizard that Spielberg made famous, all running for their bacon with the lowly bipeds who can’t leave things alone. Although there was another sequence of note, where monkey-defends-girl against those Tyrannosaurus nasties, which was just amazing in its technical accomplishment. The chimp is fighting the two lizards as they all fall down a ravine.
You root for movies like this because, as I say, it is about the monkey in us all, and you want to root for yourself.