Produced by Jan Blenkin, Carolynne Cunningham, Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh.

Cast: Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann, Colin Hanks, Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Kyle Chandler, Evan Parke.

Peter Jackson’s career as a filmmaker was famously inspired by his seeing on television the first, 1933 version of King Kong, starring Fay Wray, when he was nine years old. It is therefore understandable that a great deal of his tribute here would remain faithful to the original story. Not only the story, however, but also the wonder and the magic are successfully created in a film where the incredible is firmly placed in everyday realism, and even more than the superb visual effects, the emotional truth strikes a deep and resonant chord.

Set like the original in New York in 1933, where the Great Depression has affected so many, filmmaker Carl Denham (Jack Black, looking uncannily like a Peter Jackson clone, just as the first Carl was loosely based on writer/director Merian Cooper) resorts to subterfuge to complete his nature film against staggering obstacles. His leading lady has pulled out, he has only 15 pages of script, and not least, finance has been withdrawn and he is broke. Using a combination of entrepreneurial enthusiasm and conman tricks he persuades his assistant Preston (Colin Hanks) and ship’s captain Englehorn (Thomas Kretschmann) that completing his film in an exotic location will result in great riches. His financial backers have already scoffed at the dubious, hand-drawn map he has found of an otherwise uncharted island which draws him like a magnet, saying “It’s not the principle, it’s the money!” Unhappily they watch from the dock as their money sails away.

With the certain eye of a director who knows exactly the qualities he is looking for, Carl has also managed to find the perfect actress to play his heroine. Equal time in the early stages of the story is given to the plight of destitute vaudeville actress Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts, who has perhaps never looked so waif-like, so vulnerable and so charismatic). Carl’s opportune rescue is a prelude to convincing her to embark on the adventure of a lifetime with him and his crew. Her melancholy assertion that “No good things last!” is the emotional hurdle she will both stall at and have to overcome in this journey. Carl’s will be to realise the consequences of his obsessive quest.

Among the differences in this version to the original, the character of Ann’s unexpected love interest on board the tramp steamer S.S. Venture is not the ship’s rough first mate but more appropriately the playwright Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), a man whose plays she already knows and adores. Intelligent, sensitive and barely the physical hero type, he is also more elegantly the opposite in every way of the enormous savage beast she will later tame with her beauty.

Unease and suspicion surfaces among the crew as they find out they are bound for the mysterious Skull Island – shrouded in fog and subject of sailors’ superstitious tales and fears over the years. In the dark they run aground on the huge jagged rocks that surround the high cliff wall of the island like teeth. While the crew battles huge waves breaking on their stricken craft, Carl and his film crew and cast manage to set off in a life-boat for a safe landing spot, camera and film on board. Appropriately it is through an enormous sea cavern lined with human skulls that they first venture on to the mysterious island, and mingled unease and curiosity is jolted into shock with the appearance of a zombie-like feral child and a tribe of warlike, apparently ritually-entranced and demented savages. A fierce battle ensues, the landing party is captured, some are killed, and Ann is offered ritualistically to the giant gorilla whose ferocity they traditionally hope to propitiate with such sacrificial victims. It is still extraordinary to see the contrast: the beautiful, elegant blonde, tiny in the gigantic, black, simian paw; the huge face that tops her height, the intelligent, crafty, brown beast eyes and the human frantic and helpless in his grasp.

This iconic scene repeats throughout the film with different emotional tonal colours, as the relationship between Ann and Kong changes, and deepens. The final close-up of Ann and Kong in profound eye-contact, a world away, on top of the Empire State Building, is devastatingly moving, a result of the gradual strengthening of the empathy and development of the connection between them, and tragic in its outcome.

The film is long but not noticeably so. It’s a mammoth story and takes the time it needs, with most of it devoted to the desperate chases through the rainforest and jungle of Skull Island where there is not only the last survivor of a race of giant apes but also dinosaurs and giant insects. The film crew follow Kong and Ann, the ship’s crew follow the film crew. On the way, through deep gorges and vine-clad cliff canyons, there’s a thunderous, tumbling stampede of a herd of brontosaurus, and an escalating number of battles with huge creatures. Everything here but the humans is on a giant scale. There are flying lizards, carnivorous locusts, centipedes four feet long and thick as a human arm, enormous spiders and bats as big as the biplanes that will attack Kong atop the urban jungle of New York. The creatures are utterly convincing and very scary. Suspense and relief are hard followed by even more danger, and there is no let up.

Apart from the awesome special effects, the character development and the relationships are the strongest elements of the film. Whereas other directors of blockbusters or brilliant, dramatic cinematography – such as Spielberg, or Tarantino - impress by the impact of intense visual and auditory experiences, making one carry the reality of the film outside the theatre, Jackson’s compelling power is more inward. It’s in the pathos and bathos of the characters’ journey, that too, can last outside the cinema, in iconic images such as Kong chained and miserable on the stage of the Alhambra theatre. Even clichéd situations or cheesy dialogue are lifted to a level of archetypal significance. It’s achieved by a solidly crafted screenplay and by the depth of meaning given by actors of the calibre of the three leads, well supported by the rest of the cast. The attention to realistic detail and the feeling of real people, flawed, fearful and intrinsically noble who are caught up in the tragedy of Kong are powerful.

Most especially the character of the great ape is wondrously believable, portrayed by Andy Serkis in techniques perfected when he played Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Kong is not anthropomorphised. The sadness in his face that finds its mirror in Ann’s is seen in countless caged and lonely animals world wide.  He is a terrifyingly powerful beast with the intelligence and nature of a beast, alike enough to the frail human who’s captured his great heart attention to be utterly undone by beauty.

© Avril Carruthers                                           9^th December 2005