King Kong

Well, Peter Jackson's mega-remake of King Kong finally made it to our screens last week and so, on Saturday night, I made myself as comfortable as I could in my seat in the main screen of the Yelmo Cineplex in Barcelona and prepared to be enthralled.

There are few 3 hr movies I'm prepared to go to see at 11.30 at night (not being a huge fan of late sessions, be they in a cinema, a bar or wherever) but I was itching to see Kong. I was a kid before the first VCRs became popular (I'm talking about before betamax and V2000 even) but that's not to say that we didn't have home entertainment. Our "home cinema" was in some ways more faithful to that term than the ubiquitous miniature loudspeakers and integrated amplifiers that you find in people's homes today. Cine Hi8 consisted of a projector and a projector screen. I guess Hi8 must have meant "8 minute highlights" because I think that's all the time the reels we had lasted. So we had the final climactic 8 minutes of Star Wars, the famous gorilla scene from Disney's Jungle Book (I Wanna Be Like You - oo - oo), the duel scene from Disney's The Sword & the Stone, and 8 climactic minutes from the original King Kong movie.

My siblings and I loved King Kong. Even though we'd seen it countless times, we would sit mesmerised when the curtains were drawn at the New York city theatre to reveal a huge shackled ape. I guess we were no sophisticates at that age because we could completely buy the illusion, which I imagine some pretty crude 1930s special effects weret trying to create. It's been years since I watched it. The projector and its screen were brought out less and less as we got older, and when my mother finally relented on her threat to walk out of the house the day a vcr was brought into it, the CineHi8 was definitively pushed into retirement by 4 ungrateful children already afflicted by a keeping-up-with -the-Joneses obsession.

King Kong is pure cinema. It is, to me, what Hollywood does best: large-scale. Over the last 10 or so years, with the rapid advances being made in digital and computer effects, the industry has churned out more than a few films which failed because of their failure to harmonise the new effects and the more traditional stays of a movie, like plot and characters. It was as if they were experimenting with a new formula that was so potent yet crude it had a tendency to blow up in their faces. In the last few years, directors seem more and more to be getting the hang of these unweildy effects and cinema-goers have been treated to some memorable scenes which have completely sustained the illusion: the Trojan fleet in Troy and the Germanic battles at the beginning of Gladiator come to mind along with Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy. Of course Jackson is probably the director who has dedicated himself most to the employment of digital computer effects to ehance a movie. Perhaps better than anybody, he has understod how a movie cannot be subordinated to its special effects and how its success in fact depends on the reverse.

As an exercise in such, Kong is perhaps much more complete a film than the LOTR threesome. LOTR had the advantage of being pure fantasy with no connection to our modern world. Kong, on the other hand, takes place in the most modern city in the world, New York, albeit in the 1930s. Interestingly, I think Jackson's decision not to set the story in the present works hugely in the film's favour as it allows the special effects to retain a certain simplicity. The choice of cast is excellent. Jack Black sufficiently keeps in check his more exuberant tendencies to give a complete performance as Denham, the cinema director whose passion for his art makes him a brilliant and visionary director while a terrible human being at the same time. Adrien Brody, as Driscoll, has enough character and sensitivy to make sure he is not overshadowed by Kong in the scenes that they share, while at the same time wisely not trying to overshadow the beast either. And Naomi Watts is wonderful in her range, playing Ann Darrow as an at first unremarkable young woman who is then transformed into an astonishing emblem of femininity through Kong's attentions to her.

Jackson remains essentially faithful to the original film while managing to evolve it. A film like Kong almost demands to be remade in order to take advantage of today's digital effects. As I said above, and it may seem obvious, the success of a film incorporating digital effects depends entirely on whether or not those effects are subordinated to the telling of the story. There are certain effects in Kong which seem to protrude inelegantly from the screen's clean corners, and, indeed, there are certain plot resolutions which would seem to indicate that handling the mammoth issue of Kong sometimes meant that the director lost his perspective. But the central effect, Kong, is masterful. The illusion is sustained from the very moment we hear him roar from the depths of his habitat right through to the moment when he slumps from the top of the Empire State Building. The story is as clever as the effects that help to sustain it too with Jackson juxtaposing his Skull islanders with his Manhattan islanders throughout the story. Watt's transformation over the course of the movie from stumbling, insecure swooner into a poised and utterly self-enlightened specimen of femininity is wonderful to watch. She is wooed first by Brody and then by Kong, and it takes the alpha-male braun of the gorilla to awaken her to herself. This awakening culiminates in her noble rejection of Brody's character when Kong is captured. After Kong, he must come across as rather effete to the woman who was previously reduced to giggling girlfoolery in his presence.

Universal Studios are banking on Kong being a slow burner at the box office. The film's failure to live up to forecasts in its first weekend's box office takings has prompted Universal to look for comparisons with Titanic, which in its first weekend did not give any sign that it would go on to be the biggest grossing film of all time. However, while Kong certainly deserves to out-gross Cameron's mega-production, I'm not sure that it will. After all, a major draw of Titanic was its love story and, while King Kong might be getting the two thumbs up in bestiality forums all over the internet, I can't see the non-star-driven "love story" element of the film drawing the same number of crowds as its maritime-mayem counterpart did using Leonardo and Kate.

This Christmas the cinema isn't likely to hold much attraction for right-wing Christians , what with two of the most acclaimed films showing being about either gay love or interspecies love! But if you're not a right-wing Christian, this Christmas, give 3 hours of your life to a beast. You won't regret it!